My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (49 page)

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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER

BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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This is all by way of saying that it was one of the greatest spasms, when it came to the release of destructive energy, in recorded history. It happened around 10:16 P.M. At that latitude and time of year, it was still light out. There were three small boats, carrying six people, anchored in the south end of the bay.
The rumbling from the earthquake generated vibrations that the occupants of the boats could feel on their skin like electric shocks. The impact of the rockfall that followed made a sound like Canada exploding. There were two women, three men, and a seven-year-old boy in the three boats. They looked up to see a wave breaking
over
the 1,700-foot-high southwest edge of Gilbert Inlet and heading for the opposite slope. What they were looking at was the largest wave ever recorded by human beings. It scythed off three-hundred-year-old pines and cedars and spruce, some of them with trunks three or four feet thick, along a trim line of 1,720 feet. That’s a wave crest 500 feet higher than the Empire State Building.
Fill your bathtub. Hold a football at shoulder height and drop it into the water. Scale the height of the initial splash up, appropriately. Imagine the height of the tub above the waterline to be 2,000 feet.
 
When I was two years old, my mother decided she’d had enough of my father and hunted down an old high school girlfriend who’d wandered so far west that she’d taken a job teaching in a grammar school in Hawaii. The school was in a little town called Pepeekeo. All of this was told to me later by my mother’s older sister. My mother and I moved in with the friend, who lived in a little beach cottage on the north shore of the island near an old mill, Pepeekeo Mill. We were about twelve miles north of Hilo. This was in 1960.
The friend’s name was Chuck. Her real name was Charlotte something, but everyone apparently called her Chuck. My aunt had a photo she showed me of me playing in the sand with some breakers in the background. I’m wearing something that looks like overalls put on backward. Chuck’s drinking beer from a can.
And one morning Chuck woke my mother and me up and asked if we wanted to see a tidal wave. I don’t remember any of this. I was in pajamas and my mother put a robe on me and we trotted down the beach and looked around the point to the north. I told my mother I was scared and she said we’d go back to the house if the water got too high. We saw the ocean suck itself out to sea smoothly and quietly, and the muck of the sand and some flipping and turning white-bellied fish that had been left behind. Then we saw it come back, without any surf or real noise, like the tide coming in in time-lapse photography. It came past the high-tide mark and just up to our toes. Then it receded again. “Some wave,” my mother told me. She lifted me up so I could see the end of it. Some older boys who lived on Mamalahoa Highway sprinted past us, chasing the water. They got way out, the mud spraying up behind their heels. And the water came back again, this time even smaller. The boys, as far out as they were, were still only up to their waists. We could hear how happy they were. Chuck told us the show was over and we headed up the beach to the house. My mother wanted me to walk but I wanted her to carry me. We heard a noise and when we looked we saw the third wave. It was already the size of the lighthouse out at Wailea. They got me into the cottage and halfway up the stairs to the second floor when the walls blew in. My mother managed to slide me onto a corner of the roof that was spinning half a foot above the water. Chuck went under and didn’t come up again. My mother was carried out to sea, still hanging on to me and the roof chunk. She’d broken her hip and bitten through her lower lip. We were picked up later that day by a little boat near Honohina.
She was never the same after that, my aunt told me. This was maybe by way of explaining why I’d been put up for adoption a few months later. My mother had gone to teach somewhere in Alaska. Somewhere away from the coast, my aunt added with a smile. She pretended she didn’t know exactly where. I’d been left with the Franciscan Sisters at the Catholic orphanage in Kahili. On the day of my graduation from the orphanage school, one of the Sisters who’d taken an interest in me grabbed me by both shoulders and shook me and said, “What is it you
want
? What’s the
matter
with you?” They weren’t bad questions, as far as I was concerned.
I saw my aunt that once, the year before college. My fiancée, many years later, asked if we were going to invite her to the wedding, and then later that night said, “I guess you’re not going to answer, huh?”
 
Who decides when the time’s right to have kids? Who decides how many kids to have? Who decides how they’re going to be brought up? Who decides when the parents are going to stop having sex, and stop listening to each other? Who decides when everyone’s not just going to walk out on everyone else? These are all group decisions. Mutual decisions. Decisions that a couple makes
in consultation with each other.
I’m stressing that because it doesn’t always work that way.
My wife’s goal-oriented. Sometimes I can see on her face her
To Do
list when she looks at me. It makes me think she doesn’t want me anymore, and the idea is so paralyzing and maddening that I lose track of myself: I just step in place and forget where I am for a minute or two. “What’re you doing?” she asked once, outside a restaurant.
And of course I can’t tell her that. Because then what do I do with whatever follows?
We have one kid, Donald, named for the single greatest man my wife has ever known. That would be her father. Donald’s seven. When he’s in a good mood he finds me in the house and wraps his arms around me, his chin on my hip. When he’s in a bad mood I have to turn off the TV to get him to answer. He has a good arm and good hand-eye coordination but he gets easily frustrated. “Who’s
that
sound like?” my wife always says when I point it out.
He loses everything. He loses stuff even if you physically put it in his hands when he’s on his way home. Gloves, hats, knapsacks, lunch money, a bicycle, homework, pencils, pens, his dog, his friends, his way. Sometimes he doesn’t worry about it; sometimes he’s distraught. If he starts out not worrying about it, sometimes I make him distraught. When I tell these stories, I’m Mr. Glass Half Empty. Which is all by way of getting around to what my wife calls the central subject, which is my ingratitude. Do I always have to start with the negatives? Don’t I think he
knows
when I always talk about him that way?
“She says you’re too harsh,” is the way my father-in-law put it. At the time he was sitting on my front porch and sucking down my beer. He said he thought of it as a kind of mean-spiritedness.
I had no comeback for him at the time. “You weren’t very nice to my parents,” my wife mentioned when they left.
Friends commiserate with her on the phone.
My father-in-law’s a circuit court judge. I run a seaplane charter out of Ketchikan. Wild Wings Aviation. My wife snorts when I answer the phone that way. My father-in-law tells her, who knows, maybe I’ll make a go of it. And if the thing does go under, I can always fly geologists around for one of the energy companies.
Even knowing what I make, he says that.
Number one on her
To Do
list is another kid. She says Donald very much wants a little brother. I haven’t really heard him address the subject. She wants to know what
I
want. She asks with her mouth set, like she’s already figured the odds that I’m going to let her down. It makes me what she calls unresponsive.
She’s been after me about it for a year now. And two months ago, after three straight days of our being polite to each other—Good morning; How’d you sleep?—and avoiding brushing even shoulders when passing through doorways, I made an appointment with a Dr. Calvin at Bartlett Regional about a vasectomy. “Normally, couples come in together,” he told me at the initial consult.
“This whole thing’s been pretty hard on her,” I told him.
Apparently it’s an outpatient thing, and if I opt for the simpler procedure I could be out of his office and home in forty-five minutes. He quoted me a thousand dollars, but not much out of pocket, because our health insurance should cover it. I was told to go off and give it some thought and get back in touch if and when I was ready to schedule it. I called back two days later and scheduled it for the day before Memorial Day. “That’ll give you some time to rest up afterward,” the girl who did the scheduling pointed out.
 
“He
had
a pretty big trauma when he was a baby,” my wife reminded her mom a few weeks ago. They didn’t realize I was at the kitchen window. “A couple of traumas, actually.” She said it like she understood that it was going to be a perennial on her
To Do
list.
So for the last two months I’ve gone around the house like a demolition expert who’s already wired the entire thing to blow and keeps rechecking the charges and connections.
 
It was actually flying some geologists around that got me going on Lituya Bay in the first place. I flew in a couple of guys from Exxon-Mobil who taught me more than I wanted to know about Tertiary rocks and why they always got people salivating when it came to what they called petroleum investigations. But one of the guys also told the story of what happened there in 1958. He was the one who didn’t want to camp in the bay. His buddy made serious fun of him. The next time I flew them in I’d done my research, and we talked about what a crazy place it was. I was staying overnight with them, because they could pay for it, and they had to be out at like dawn the next morning.
However you measure things like that, it has to be one of the most dangerous bodies of water on earth. It feels freakish even when you first see it. It’s a tidal inlet that’s hugely deep—I think at its center it’s seven hundred feet—but at its entrance there’s barely enough draft for a small boat. So at high and low tides the water moves through the bottleneck like from a fire hose. That twilight we watched a piece of drift-wood
keep up
with a tern that was gliding with the wind. The whole bay is huge but the entrance is only eighty yards wide and broken up by boulders. Stuff coming in on the high tide is like on the world’s largest water slide. And when the tide’s running the other way, when it hits the ocean swells, it’s as if surf’s up on the north shore of Hawaii from both directions at once. We were two hundred yards away and had to shout over the noise. The Frenchman who discovered the bay lost twenty-one men and three boats at the entrance. The Tlingits lost so many people over the course of their time there that they named it Channel of the Water-Eyes,
water-eyes
being their word for the drowned.
But the scared guy had me motor him up to the head of the bay and showed me the other problem, the problem I’d already read about: as he put it, stupefyingly large and highly fractured rocks standing at vertiginous angles over deep water in an active fault zone. On top of that, their having absorbed heavy rainfall and constant freezing and thawing. The earthquakes on this fault were as violent as anywhere else in the world, and they’d be shaking unstable cliffs over a deep and tightly enclosed body of water.
“Yeah yeah yeah,” his buddy said, passing around beef jerky from the backseat. I was putt-putting the seaplane back and forth as our water taxi at the top of the T. Forested cliffs went straight up five to six thousand feet all around us. I don’t even know how trees that size grew like that.
“You have any kids?” the scared guy asked, out of nowhere. I said yeah. He said he did, too, and started hunting up a photo.
“Well, what’s a body to do when millions of tons avalanche into it?” his buddy in the back asked.
The scared guy couldn’t find the photo. He made a face at his wallet, like what else was new. “Make waves,” he said. “Gi-normous waves.”
While we crossed from shore to shore they pointed out some of the trim lines I’d read about. The lines went back as far as the middle of the 1800s. The experts figure the dates by cutting down trees and looking at the growth rings. The lines look like rows of plantings in a field, except we’re talking about fifty-degree slopes and trees 80 to 90 feet high. There are five lines, and their heights are the heights of the waves. One from 1854 at 395 feet. One twenty years later at 80 feet. One twenty-five years after that at 200 feet. One from 1936 at 490 feet. And one from 1958 at 1,720.
That’s five events in the last hundred years, or one every twenty. It’s not hard to do the math, in terms of whether or not the bay’s currently overdue.
In fact, that night we did the math, after lights-out in our little three-man tent. The scared guy’s buddy was skeptical. He was still eating, having moved on to something called Moose Munch. We could hear the rustling of the bag and the crunching in the dark. He said that given that the waves occurred every twenty years, the odds of one occurring on any single day in the bay were about eight thousand to one. There was a plunk down by the shore when something jumped. After we were quiet for a minute, he joked, “That’s one of the first signs.”
The odds were way smaller than that, the scared guy finally answered. He asked his buddy to think about how much unstable slope they’d already seen from the air. All of that had been exposed by the last wave. And it had now been exposed almost fifty years, he said. There were open fractures that were already visible.
So what did
he
think the odds were? his buddy wanted to know.

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