The Signature of All Things: A Novel

Chapter Twenty-six

Tomorrow Morning left Tahiti three days later, to return to his mission on Raiatea—and to his wife and children. For the most part, over the course of those days, Alma kept to herself. She spent a good bit of time in her fare, alone with Roger the dog, contemplating all she had learned. She felt simultaneously relieved and burdened: relieved of all her old questions; burdened by the answers.

She skipped the morning baths in the river with Sister Manu and the other women, for she did not want them to see the blue dye that still faintly marked her skin. She went to church services, but she stayed near the back of the crowd, and made herself inconspicuous. She and Tomorrow Morning never had a moment alone together again. In fact, from what she could see, he never had a moment to himself, either. It was a miracle she had ever been able to find seclusion with him at all.

The day before Tomorrow Morning’s departure, there was another celebration in his honor—a duplicate of the remarkable festivities two weeks prior. Again, there was dancing and feasting. Again, there were musicians, and wrestling matches, and cockfights. Again, there were fire pits and slaughtered pigs. Alma could see more clearly now how venerated Tomorrow Morning was, even more than he was loved. She could also see the position of responsibility he held, and how ably he conducted himself in that position. The people draped numberless strands of flowers around his neck; the flowers hung heavily upon him, like chains. He was presented with gifts: a pair of green doves in a cage, a drove of protesting young pigs, an ornate eighteenth-century Dutch gun that could no longer shoot, a Bible bound in goatskin, jewelry for his wife, bolts of calico, sacks of sugar and tea, a fine iron bell for his church. The people laid the gifts at his feet, and he received them with grace.

At dusk, a group of women with brooms came down to the shoreline and began to sweep clean the beach for a game of haru raa puu. Alma had never before seen a game of haru raa puu, but she knew what it was, for the Reverend Welles had told her. The game—whose name translated as something like “seizing the ball”—was traditionally played by two teams of women, who faced off against each other across a stretch of beach approximately one hundred feet in length. At either end of this ad hoc field they drew a line in the sand, to signify a goal. The function of a ball was served by a thick bundle of tightly twisted plantain fronds, about the diameter of a medium-sized pumpkin, though not as heavy. The point of the game, as Alma had learned, was to seize the ball from the opposing team and to scramble down to the opposite end of the field without being tackled by one’s opponents. If the ball happened to go into the sea, the game would continue in the waves. A player was permitted to do absolutely anything to stop her opponents from scoring.

Haru raa puu was considered by the English missionaries to be both unladylike and stimulating, and was therefore forbidden at all the other settlements. Indeed, to be fair to the missionaries, the game went quite a bit beyond unladylike. Women were routinely injured in matches of haru raa puu—limbs broken, skulls cracked, blood shed. It was, as the Reverend Welles stated admiringly, “a stunning show of savagery.” But violence was quite the point of it. In the olden times, as men practiced for war, the women had practiced haru raa puu. Thus the ladies, too, would be prepared, should the time come to fight. Why had the Reverend Welles allowed haru raa puu to continue, then, when the other missionaries had banned it as an unchristian expression of pure savagery? Why, for the same reason as always: he simply could not see the harm in it.

Once the game began, though, Alma could not help but think that the Reverend Welles had been gravely mistaken on this point: there was potential for tremendous harm in a match of haru raa puu. The moment the ball was in play, the women were transformed into creatures both formidable and frightening. These kind and hospitable Tahitian ladies—whose bodies Alma had seen at morning baths, whose food she had shared, whose babies she had dandled upon her knee, whose voices she had heard uplifted in earnest prayer, and whose hair she had seen ornamented so prettily with flowers—rearranged themselves immediately into rival battalions of demonic hellcats. Alma could not determine whether the point of the game was, indeed, to seize the ball or to tear off the limbs of one’s opponents—or perhaps a combination of both. She saw sweet Sister Etini (Sister Etini!) make a grab for another woman’s hair and throw her to the ground—and her opponent had not even been near the ball!

The crowd on the beach loved the spectacle and raised a clamor of cheers. The Reverend Welles cheered, too, and Alma saw for the first time the Cornish dockside ruffian he had once been, before Christ and Mrs. Welles had saved him from his belligerent ways. Watching the women attack the ball and each other, the Reverend Welles no longer looked like a harmless little elf; he more resembled a fearless little rat terrier.

Then quite suddenly, absolutely out of nowhere, Alma was run over by a horse.

Or that was what it felt like. It was not a horse, however, that had knocked her to the ground; it was Sister Manu, who’d come running off the field to charge at Alma sideways with full might. Sister Manu gripped Alma by the arm and dragged her onto the field of play. The crowd loved this. The clamor grew louder. Alma caught a glimpse of the Reverend Welles’s face, bright with the thrill of this surprising turn of events, shouting his delight. She glanced at Tomorrow Morning, whose demeanor was polite and reserved. He was far too much the majestic figure to laugh at such an exhibition, but neither was he disapproving.

Alma did not want to play haru raa puu, but nobody had conferred with her on this point. She was in the game before she knew it. She felt as though she was being attacked from all sides, but this was most likely because she was being attacked from all sides. Somebody thrust the ball into her hands and pushed her. It was Sister Etini.

“RUN!” she shouted.

Alma ran. She did not get far before she was knocked to the ground again. Somebody had struck her with an arm to the throat, and she was flung on her back. She bit her tongue on the way down, and tasted blood. She considered simply staying down on the sand to avoid more severe injury, but she feared a trampling by the pitiless herd. She got to her feet. The crowd cheered again. She did not have time to think. She was pulled into a scrimmage of women and had no choice but to go where they were going. She had not the faintest notion of where the ball was. She could not imagine how anyone could know where the ball was. The next thing she knew, she was in the water. She was knocked down again. She came up gasping, salt water in her eyes and down her throat. Somebody pushed her farther out, deeper.

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 all: 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.