The Signature of All Things: A Novel

Chapter Twenty-four

October arrived.

The island entered the season the Tahitians call Hia‘ia—the season of cravings, when breadfruit is difficult to find and the people sometimes go hungry. There was no hunger at Matavai Bay, thankfully. There was no abundance, to be sure, but neither did anyone starve. Fish and taro root took care of that.

Oh, taro root! Tedious, tasteless taro root! Pounded and mashed, boiled and slippery, baked over coals, rolled into damp little balls called poi, and used for everything from breakfast to communion to pig food. The monotony of taro root was sometimes interrupted by the addition of tiny bananas to the menu—sweet and wonderful bananas that could nearly be swallowed whole—but even these were now difficult to come by. Alma looked at the pigs longingly, but Sister Manu, it appeared, was saving them for another day, for a hungrier day. So there was no pork to be enjoyed, simply taro root at every meal, and sometimes, if one was lucky, a good-sized fish. Alma would have given anything to have a day without taro root—but a day without taro root meant a day without food. She began to understand why the Reverend Welles had given up on eating altogether.

The days were quiet, hot, and still. Everyone grew listless and lazy. Roger the dog dug a hole in Alma’s garden and slept there more or less all day long, tongue hanging out. Bald chickens scratched for food, gave up, and squatted in the shade, discouraged. Even the Hiro contingent—those most active of little lads—dozed all afternoon in the shade, like old dogs. Sometimes they stirred themselves to lackadaisical employments. Hiro had got hold of an ax head, which he hung from a rope and banged on with a rock, as a gong. One of the Makeas beat on an old barrel hoop with a stone. It was a kind of music they were making, Alma supposed, but to her it sounded uninspired and weary. All of Tahiti was bored and tired.

In her father’s time, this place had been lit up by the torches of war and lust. The beautiful young Tahitian men and women had danced so obscenely and wildly around fires on this very beach that Henry Whittaker—young and unformed—had needed to turn his head away in alarm. Now it was all dullness. The missionaries, the French, and the whaling ships, with their sermons and bureaucracy and diseases, had driven the devil out of Tahiti. The mighty warriors had all died. Now there were just these lazy children napping in the shade, clanging on ax heads and barrel hoops as a barely sufficient means of diversion. What were the young to do with their wildness anymore?

Alma continued to search for The Boy, taking longer and longer walks, alone, with Roger the dog, or with the unnamed skinny pony. She explored the little villages and settlements around the shoreline of the island in both directions from Matavai Bay. She saw all sorts of men and boys. She saw some handsome youths, yes, with the noble forms that the early European visitors had so admired, but she also saw young men with severe elephantiasis of the legs, and boys with scrofula in their eyes from the venereal diseases of their mothers. She saw children bent and twisted with tuberculosis of the spine. She saw youngsters who ought to have been comely, but were marked by smallpox and measles. She found nearly empty villages, vacated over the years by illness and death. She saw mission settlements considerably more strict than Matavai Bay. She sometimes even attended church services at these other missions, where nobody chanted in the Tahitian language; instead, the people sang anodyne Presbyterian hymns in heavy accents. She did not see The Boy in any of these congregations. She passed tired laborers, lost rovers, quiet fishermen. She saw one quite old man who sat in the baking sun, playing the Tahitian flute in the traditional way, by blowing into it with one nostril—a sound so melancholy that it caused Alma’s lungs to ache with nostalgia for her own home. But still, she never saw The Boy.

Her searches were fruitless, her census came up empty every day, but she was always glad to return to Matavai Bay and the routines of the mission. She was always grateful when the Reverend Welles invited her to join him in the coral gardens. Alma realized that his coral gardens were something akin to her own moss beds back at White Acre—something rich and slow-growing that could be studied for years on end, as a means of passing the decades without collapsing into loneliness. She much enjoyed the conversations on their excursions to the reef. He had asked Sister Manu to weave for Alma a pair of reef sandals just like his own, of thickly knotted pandanus fronds, so she could walk along the sharp coral without cutting her feet. He showed Alma the circus show of sponges, anemones, and corals—all the absorbing beauty of the shallow, clear tropical waters. He taught her the names of the colorful fish, and told her stories about Tahiti. He never once asked her questions about her own life. This brought her relief; she did not have to lie to him.

Alma also grew fond of the little church at Matavai Bay. The structure was decidedly absent of riches or glory (Alma saw far finer churches elsewhere across the island), but she always enjoyed Sister Manu’s short, emphatic, inventive sermons. She learned from the Reverend Welles that—to the Tahitian mind—there were elements of familiarity about the story of Jesus, and these strands of familiarity had helped the first missionaries introduce Christ to the natives. In Tahiti, the people believed that the world was divided into the pô and the ao, the darkness and the light. Their great lord Taroa, the creator, was born in the pô—born at night, born into darkness. The missionaries, once they learned of this mythology, explained to the Tahitians that Jesus Christ, too, had been born in the pô—born into the night, sprung from the darkness and suffering. This had captured the attention of the Tahitians. It was a dangerous and mighty destiny to be born at night. The pô was the world of the dead, the incomprehensible and the frightful. The pô was fetid and decayed and terrifying. Our Lord, taught the Englishmen, came to lead mankind out of the pô and into the light.

This all made a certain amount of sense to the Tahitians. At the very least, it caused them to admire Christ, since the boundary between the pô and the ao was dangerous territory, and only a notably brave soul would cross from one world to the other. The pô and the ao were akin to heaven and hell, the Reverend Welles explained to Alma, but there was more intercourse between them, and in the places where they mixed, things became demented. The Tahitians had never stopped fearing the pô.

“When they think I am not looking,” he said, “they still make offerings to those gods who live in the pô. They make these offerings, you see, not because they honor or love those gods of darkness, but to bribe them into staying in the world of ghosts, to keep them far away from the world of the light. The pô is a most difficult notion to defeat, you see. The pô does not cease to exist in the mind of the Tahitian, simply because daytime has arrived.”

“Does Sister Manu believe in the pô?” Alma asked.

“Absolutely not,” said the Reverend Welles, imperturbable as always. “She is a perfect Christian, as you know. But she respects the pô, you see.”

“Does she believe in ghosts, then?” Alma pushed on.

“Certainly not,” said the Reverend Welles mildly. “That would be unchristian of her. But she does not like ghosts, either, and she does not want them coming around the settlement, so sometimes she has no choice but to make them offerings, you see, to keep them away.”

“So she does believe in ghosts,” said Alma.

“Of course she doesn’t,” corrected the Reverend Welles. “She simply manages them, you see. You will find that there are certain parts of this island, too, that Sister Manu does not approve of anyone in our settlement visiting. In the highest and most inaccessible places of Tahiti, you see, it is said that a person can walk into a bank of fog and dissolve forever, straight back into the pô.”

“But does Sister Manu truly believe that could happen?” Alma asked. “That a person could dissolve?”

“Not at all,” said the Reverend Welles cheerfully. “But she disapproves of it most heartily.”

Alma wondered: Had The Boy simply vanished away into the pô?

Had Ambrose?

Alma heard nothing from the outside world. No letters came to her in Tahiti, although she frequently wrote home to Prudence and Hanneke, and sometimes even to George Hawkes. She diligently sent her letters away on whaling ships, knowing that the likelihood of their ever reaching Philadelphia was slim. She had learned that sometimes the Reverend Welles did not hear from his wife and daughter in Cornwall for two years at a time. Sometimes, when letters did arrive, they were waterlogged and unreadable after the long voyage at sea. This felt more tragic to Alma than never hearing from one’s family at all, but her friend accepted it as he accepted all vexations: with calm repose.

Alma was lonely, and the heat was insufferable—no cooler at night than during the day. Alma’s little house became an airless oven. She awoke one night with a man’s voice whispering straight into her ear, “Listen!” But when she sat up, no one was in the room—none of the Hiro contingent, and not Roger the dog, either. There was not even a trace of wind. She stepped outside, her heart beating strongly. Nobody was there. She saw that Matavai Bay had become, in the hushed and balmy night, as smooth as a mirror. The entire canopy of stars above her was reflected perfectly in the water, as though there were two heavens now: one above, one below. The silence and purity of this was formidable. The beach felt heavy with presences.

Had Ambrose ever seen such a thing while he was here? Two heavens, in one night? Had he ever felt this dread and wonderment, this sense of both loneliness and presence? Was he the one who had just awoken her, with that voice in her ear? She tried to recall if it had sounded like Ambrose’s voice, but she could not say for sure. Would she even know Ambrose’s voice anymore, if she heard it?

It would have been precisely like Ambrose, though, to wake her up and encourage her to listen. Certainly, yes. If ever a dead man would try to speak to the living, it would be Ambrose Pike—he, with all his lofty fancies of the metaphysical and the miraculous. He had even halfway convinced Alma herself of miracles, and she was not susceptible to such beliefs. Had they not seemed like sorcerers, that night in the binding closet—speaking to each other without words, speaking through the soles of their feet and the palms of their hands? He had wanted to sleep beside her, he’d said, so he could listen to her thoughts. She had wanted to sleep beside him so that she could fornicate at last, put a man’s member inside her mouth—but he had merely wanted to listen to her thoughts. Why could she not have allowed him to simply listen? Why could he not have allowed her to reach for him?

Had he ever thought of her, even once, when he was here in Tahiti?

Perhaps he was attempting to send messages to her now, but the breach was too wide. Maybe the words grew soggy and indecipherable across the great gulf between death and earth—just like those sad, ruined letters that the Reverend Welles sometimes received from his wife in England.

“Who were you?” Alma asked Ambrose in the leaden night, looking across the silent, reflective bay. Her voice on the empty beach was so loud that it startled her. She listened for an answer until her ears ached, but she heard nothing. There was not so much as a tiny wave lapping the beach. The water might as well have been molten pewter, and the air, too.

“Where are you now, Ambrose?” she asked, more quietly this time.

Not a sound.

“Show me where I can find The Boy,” she requested, in a low whisper.

Ambrose did not answer.

Matavai Bay did not answer.

The sky did not answer.

She was blowing on cold embers; nothing was here.

Alma sat down and waited. She thought of the story the Reverend Welles had told her of Taroa, the original god of the Tahitians. Taroa, the creator. Taroa, born in a seashell. Taroa lay silently for countless ages as the only thing living in the universe. The world was so empty that when he called out across the darkness, there was not even an echo. He nearly died of loneliness. Out of that inestimable solitude and emptiness, Taroa brought forth our world.

Alma lay back on the sand and shut her eyes. It was more comfortable out here than on her mattress in her stuffy fare. She did not mind the crabs, who tottered and skittered busily around her. They, inside their shells, were the only things moving on the beach, the only things alive in the universe. She waited on that small sliver of earth between the two heavens until the sun rose and all the stars vanished from both the sky and the sea, but still nobody told her anything.

Then Christmas came, and with it the rainy season. The rain brought relief from the infernal heat, but it also brought snails of amazing size, and damp patches of mold that grew in the folds of Alma’s increasingly shabby skirts. The black sand beach of Matavai Bay grew sodden as pudding. Drenching rainstorms kept Alma in her house all day, where she could scarcely hear her own thoughts over the thundering water on her roof. Nature increasingly took over her tiny living space. The lizard population in Alma’s ceiling tripled overnight—a near-biblical pestilence—and they left thick drops of excrement and of half-digested insects throughout the fare. The one shoe that Alma had left in the world sprouted mushrooms within its festering depths. She hung her bunches of bananas from the rafters, to keep wet and insistent rats from absconding with them.

Roger the dog showed up one night, as per his usual evening patrol, and then stayed for days; he simply did not have the heart to face down the rain. Alma wished he would take on the rats, but he did not seem to have the heart for that, either. Roger would still not allow Alma to feed him by hand without snapping at her, but he would now sometimes share her food if she put it on the floor for him and turned her back. Sometimes he permitted her to stroke his head while he dozed.

Storms came in irregularly timed onslaughts. One could hear the storms building from far across the sea—steady roaring gales from the southwest that grew louder and louder, like an oncoming train. If the storm promised to be unusually severe, sea urchins would crawl out of the bay, seeking higher, safer ground. Sometimes they took shelter in Alma’s house: another reason to watch where she stepped. Rain came like a spray of arrows. The river at the other end of the beach churned with mud, and the surface of the bay boiled and spat. As the storm grew heavier, Alma would watch as her world closed in on her. Fog and darkness would approach from the sea. First the horizon would disappear, then the island of Moorea in the distance would vanish, then the reef was gone, then the beach, and then she and Roger would be all alone in the mist. The world was now as small as Alma’s tiny and not particularly waterproof house. The wind blew sideways, the thunder bellowed frightfully, and the rain attacked with full force.

Then the rain would stop for a spell and the blistering sun would return—sudden, brilliant, stunning—though never long enough that Alma could properly dry out her sleeping pallet. Steam rose off the sand in billowing waves. Currents of humid wind swept down the mountainside. The air across the beach snapped and shimmied, like a bedsheet shaken out—as though the beach itself were shaking off the violence that had just been visited upon it. Then a humid calm would prevail, for a few hours or a few days, until another storm rolled in.

These were days to miss a library and a vast, dry, warm mansion. Alma might have fallen into terrible despair during the rainy season in Tahiti, but for one delightful discovery: the children of Matavai Bay loved the rain. The Hiro contingent loved it most of all—and why wouldn’t they? For this was the season of mudslides and puddle-splashing and dangerous rides through the wild torrential currents of the now-swollen river. The five little boys turned into five otters, not merely undaunted by the wet, but delighted by it. All the indolence they had demonstrated during the hot and dry season of cravings was now washed away, replaced by vivid, sudden life. The Hiro contingent were like mosses, Alma realized; they might dry out and go limp in the heat, but they could be revived instantly by a good soaking. Resurrection engines themselves, were these extraordinary children! They had such purpose and vigor and ebullience as they sprang back to action in this newly soaked world that it caused Alma to think back to her own childhood. The rain and mud had never stopped her from exploring, either. This recollection raised a sharp and sudden question: So why was she cowering inside her house now? She had never avoided inclement weather as a girl, so why avoid it now, as an adult? If there was no place to shelter on this island where a person could stay dry, then why not simply get wet? This question provoked Alma to another sudden question: Why had she not enlisted the help of the Hiro contingent in her search for The Boy? Who better to find a missing Tahitian youth than other Tahitian youth?

Upon these realizations, Alma ran out of her house and hailed down those five wild boys, who—at that moment—were throwing mud at each other with a tremendous sense of purpose. They came running over to Alma as one slippery, muddy, laughing mass. It amused them to see the white lady standing on their beach in the middle of a rainstorm in her soggy dress, getting drenched before their eyes. It was good entertainment, and it cost them nothing.

Alma drew the boys near and spoke to them in a mixture of Tahitian, English, and passionate hand gestures. Later, she would not remember quite how she managed to present the idea, but her central message had been this: ’Tis the season for adventure, lads! She asked them if they knew the places in the center of the island where Sister Manu did not like people of the settlement to go. Did they know all of the forbidden places, where the cliff people dwelled, and where the most remote heathen villages could be found? Would they like to take Sister Whittaker there, on some grand adventures?

Would they? Why, of course they would! It was such a diverting notion that they started off that very day. In fact, they started off immediately, and Alma followed them without hesitation. Without shoes, without maps, without food, without—heaven forfend—umbrellas, the boys led Alma straight up into the hills beyond the mission settlement, far from the safe little coastal villages she had already explored on her own. Straight up they went, into the fog, into the rain clouds, into the jungle peaks that Alma had first seen from the deck of the Elliot, and which had appeared so fearsome and alien to her at the time. Up they went—and not only on this day, either, but every single day for the next month. Each day, they explored ever more remote trails and ever more wild destinations, often in the driving rain, and always with Alma Whittaker on their heels.

At first Alma worried she would not be able to keep up with them, but soon enough she realized two things: that her years of botanical collecting had rendered her exceptionally fit, and that these children were rather sweetly considerate of their guest’s limitations. They slowed down for Alma at particularly perilous spots, and did not ask her to leap across deep crevasses as they did, or scale wet cliffs by hand, as they could with easy proficiency. Sometimes the Hiro contingent got behind her on a particularly steep climb and pushed her up rather ignobly, with their hands on her broad bottom, but Alma didn’t mind: they were merely trying to help. They were generous with her. They cheered when she made ascents, and if night fell while they were still deep in the jungle, they held her hands as they guided her back toward the safety of the mission. On these dark walks, they taught her warrior chants in Tahitian—the songs that men sing, to summon courage in the face of danger.

The Tahitians were known across the South Seas as deft climbers and fearless hikers (Alma had heard of islanders who could march thirty miles a day through this inaccessible terrain without faltering), but Alma was not one to falter, either—not when she was on a hunt, and she felt strongly that this was the hunt of her life. This was her best chance to find The Boy. If he was still anywhere on this island, these tireless children would track him down.

Alma’s increasingly long absences from the mission did not go unnoticed.

When sweet Sister Etini asked Alma at last, with a worried face, where she was spending her days, Alma said simply, “I am hunting for mosses, with the help of your five most able-bodied young naturalists!”

Nobody doubted her, for it was the perfect season for moss. Alma, indeed, spotted all manner of intriguing bryophytes on the stones and trees that they passed, but she did not pause to look closely. The mosses would always be there; she was looking for something more ephemeral, more urgent: a man. A man who knew secrets. To find him, she had to move in Human Time.

The boys, for their part, loved this unexpected game of leading the peculiar old lady all over Tahiti, to see all that was forbidden and to meet the most remote of peoples. They took Alma to abandoned temples and to sinister-looking caves, where human bones could still be glimpsed in the corners. There were sometimes living Tahitians haunting these grim locales, too, but The Boy was never among them. They took her to a small settlement on the banks of Lake Maeva, where the women still dressed in grass skirts, and where the men had faces covered with macabre tattoos, but The Boy was not there, either. The Boy was not in the company of the hunters they passed on these slippery trails, either, nor on the slopes of Mount Orohena, nor Mount Aorii, nor in the long volcanic tunnels. The Hiro contingent took her to an emerald ridge on the top of the world, so high that it seemed to bisect the very sky—for it was raining on one side of the ridge, but sunny on the other. Alma stood on this precarious peak with darkness to her left and brightness to her right, but even here—at the highest imaginable vantage point, at the collision of weather itself, at the intersection of the pô and the ao—The Boy was nowhere to be seen.

Because they were clever, the children eventually gleaned that Alma was looking for something, but it was Hiro—always the cleverest—who realized she was looking for somebody.

“He not here?” Hiro asked Alma with concern, at the end of each day. Hiro had taken to speaking English, and fancied himself quite supreme at it.

Alma never confirmed she was looking for a person, but she never denied it, either.

“We find he tomorrow!” Hiro would swear every day, but January passed and February passed and still Alma did not find The Boy.

“We find he next sabbath!” Hiro promised—for “sabbath” was the local term for “a week.” But four more Sabbaths passed, and never did Alma find The Boy. Now it was April already. Hiro began to grow concerned and morose. He could think of nowhere new to take Alma on their wild jaunts around the island. This was no longer an amusing diversion; this had clearly become a serious campaign, and Hiro knew he was failing at it. The other members of the contingent, sensing Hiro’s heavy spirits, lost their joy as well. This was when Alma decided to unshoulder the five boys of their responsibilities. They were too young to be carrying the burden of her burden; she would not see them weighted with by worry and responsibility, just to chase down a phantom figure on her behalf.

Alma released the Hiro contingent from the game and never went hiking with them again. As thanks, she gave each of the five boys a piece of her precious microscope—which they themselves had returned to her nearly intact over the last several months—and she shook their hands. Speaking in Tahitian, she told them they were the greatest warriors who had ever lived. She thanked them for their courageous tour of the known world. She told them she had found all that she needed to find. Then she sent them off on their way, to recommence their previous career of constant, directionless play.

The rainy season ended. Alma had been in Tahiti for nearly a year. She cleared the moldering grass off the floor of her house, and brought in new grass once more. She restuffed her rotting mattress with dry straw. She watched the lizard population diminish as the days grew brighter and crisper. She made a new broom and swept the walls free of cobwebs. One morning, overcome by a need to refresh her sense of mission, she opened Ambrose’s valise to look yet again at the drawings of The Boy, only to find that—over the course of the rainy season—they had been utterly consumed by mold. She tried to separate the pages one from the other, but they dissolved in her hands into pasty green morsels. Some sort of moth had been at the drawings, too, and had made a meal of the crumbs. She could not salvage any of it. She could not see a trace of The Boy’s face anymore, nor the beautiful lines made by Ambrose’s hand. The island had eaten the only remaining evidence of her inexplicable husband and his incomprehensible, chimeric muse.

The disintegration of the drawings felt like another death to Alma: now, even the phantom was gone. It made her wish to weep, and most certainly made her begin doubting her judgment. She had seen so many faces in Tahiti over the previous ten months, but now she wondered whether she truly could have identified The Boy at all, even if he had been standing in front of her. Perhaps she had seen him, after all? Mightn’t he have been one of those young men at the wharf in Papeete, on the first day she’d arrived? Mightn’t she have walked past him, any number of times? Mightn’t he possibly even live here at the settlement, and she had simply grown immune to his face? She had nothing to check her memory against anymore. The Boy had barely existed, and now he did not exist at all. She closed the valise as though closing the lid of a coffin.

Alma could not remain in Tahiti. She knew this now without a doubt. She ought never to have come at all. What an awful lot of energy and resolve and expense it had required to get herself to this island of riddles, and now she was stranded, and for no good reason. Worse, she had become a burden to this small settlement of honest souls, whose food she had eaten, whose resources she had strained, whose children she had deputized for her own irresponsible purposes. What a fine state of affairs, was this! Alma felt she had fully lost the thread of her life’s purpose, whatever flimsy thread it had ever been. She had interrupted her dull but honorable study of mosses to advance this feeble search for a ghost—or, rather, two ghosts: for Ambrose and The Boy, both. And for what? She knew no more about Ambrose now than she had known before she arrived here. All reports in Tahiti declared her husband to have been precisely the man he’d always seemed: a gentle virtuous soul, incapable of malfeasance, too good for this world.

It was beginning to dawn upon her that, very possibly, The Boy may never have existed at all. Otherwise Alma would have found him by now, or somebody would have spoken of him—even if in the most roundabout manner. Ambrose must have invented him. This idea was sadder than anything else Alma could have imagined. The Boy had been the figment of a lonely man with an unsound mind. Ambrose had so longed for a companion, he’d drawn himself one. Through his conjuring of a friend—a beautiful phantom lover—he had found the spiritual marriage for which he’d always longed. It made a certain sense. Ambrose’s mind had never been steady, not even under the best of circumstances! This was a man whose dearest friend had committed him to a hospital for the insane, and who had believed that he could see God’s fingerprints pressed into the botanical. Ambrose was a man who saw angels in orchids, and who once believed he was an angel himself—to think of it! She had come halfway around the world, looking for a wraith concocted from a lonely man’s fragile and demented imagination.

It was a simple story, yet she had complicated it with her futile investigations. Perhaps she had wished for the tale to be more sinister, if only to render her own story more tragic. Perhaps she had wished Ambrose to be guilty of abominable things, of pederasty and depravity, such that she could despise him, rather than long for him. Perhaps she had wished to find evidence not of one Boy here in Tahiti, but of many boys—a throng of catamites, whom Ambrose had violated and ruined, one after the other. But there was no evidence of any such thing. The truth was merely this: Alma had been foolish and libidinous enough to marry an innocent young man possessed of faulty sanity. When that young man disappointed her, she had been cruel and angry enough to exile him here to the South Seas, where he had died lonely and unhinged, adrift in fantasies, lost in a hopeless little settlement governed—if one could even call it governance!—by a guileless, ineffectual old missionary.

As for why Ambrose’s valise and his drawings had remained untouched (except by nature) in Alma’s unguarded fare in Tahiti for nearly a year, when all of her other possessions had been borrowed, pilfered, picked apart, or ransacked . . . well, she simply did not have the imagination to solve that mystery. What’s more, she did not have the remaining will to contend with yet another impossible question.

There was nothing more to be learned here.

She could find no inducement to stay. She would need to assemble a plan for the remaining years of her life. She had been impulsive and misguided, but she would leave on the next whaling ship heading north, and find someplace to live. She knew only that she must not go back to Philadelphia. She had relinquished White Acre and could never return there; it would be unfair to Prudence, who had the right to take possession of the estate without Alma hovering about as a nuisance. In any case, it would be a humiliation to return home. She would need to begin anew. She would also need to find a way to support herself. She would send word tomorrow to Papeete that she was looking for a berth on a good ship with a respectable captain who had heard of Dick Yancey.

She was not at peace, but at least she was decided.