The People in the Trees (37 page)

He sighed. “I explained that to him,” he said. “But.” He didn’t say anything more.

We were quiet for a moment. The ground crunched and squished beneath us.

“So what does he think will happen?” I finally asked.

“He thinks they’ll just stay there, not touching the food, waiting for us to return, until they die of starvation.”

“Isn’t that a bit extreme?” They had, I reminded myself, coped well on their own for years, for decades. And yet a part of me understood Fa’a’s distress: now that we had entered the dreamers’ lives—now that we had named them as dreamers, now that we had cared for them, now that we considered them ours, something found and given meaning—it was somehow difficult to imagine them capable of living on without us.

He sighed again. “He wants to go back for them. He wants to take them to his village. I told him he couldn’t. He said he was a killer.”

“Poor Fa’a,” I said, although my answer was more reflexive than anything else. He was a good, kind person, and although I thought he was being melodramatic, I appreciated his compassion. In the absence of action,
Poor Fa’a
seemed to be the only thing to say.

“Poor Fa’a,” repeated Tallent, his voice low. “Poor Fa’a.”

And then we were almost at the end. I had experienced the journey of almost six months before in reverse and was surprised at how familiar the sensations felt, and how friendly too: here I was stumbling over the same slippery crosshatch of roots, and growing heartily tired of the endless march of green, and feeling the wet air press upon me like a water-soaked mattress. Even with the dreamers—who, it must be said, were very good: obedient and placable—we were a day ahead of schedule. The boat would pick us up at midday on Tuesday, and by late afternoon on Sunday we had only another seven hours of walking to go. Once again I was impressed that Tallent had all along been keeping track of time; he even produced from his rucksack a small calendar, and seeing the days ticked off by a pencil mark made our stay on the island feel somehow both longer and more real.

He decided that we would stop early for the night and have an easy amble the next day. On Tuesday morning we would walk
the final two hours to the shore, but it wasn’t worth going earlier, because that would mean sitting by the shore getting bitten by the mosquitoes that were becoming more and more frequent the closer to water we got. Knowing that we were so near the sea made me jumpy with impatience: how I longed to see something more powerful and unknowable than the jungle or the forest, something whose surface would prickle with light, something that could ferry us away from this place.

That night we ate the last of the Spam, and I remembered the meal of crackers we had had early in our trip and how Tallent had said I would miss their crispness. There were no crackers this time—they had been consumed long before—but their absence made me think of what an imperfect place this island was: above, in the village, there was fire but no water, and here everything sagged and burped water. The trees were swollen with it, the ground was fecund with it, our bodies produced it with such unceasing constancy that everything I owned was silky with moisture. Still, it was a nice penultimate meal on the island, and the food we ate and what we lacked were only incidental. Even the dreamers seemed to realize that something grand and exciting was about to happen, for they smiled their silly smiles and chattered away and at one point Mua even rose to do a funny little half-dance that resembled the one that the women did after the cessation of their menses. Uva and Tu—who had taken advantage of the leisurely day to go vuaka hunting and had returned with a sack that squirmed with so many of them that it resembled nothing so much as a gigantic, bloated manama fruit—were particularly joyful, laughing and talking and showing their pointy teeth, relieved that their time in this impossible place was almost over and that they would soon be home, alive and, even better, with a rich man’s haul of monkeys. Only Fa’a remained locked into his fugue state, and as the rest of us clapped our hands and shouted at Mua’s dancing, he sat apart from us, staring in turn at each of the dreamers, rubbing his thumb up and down his spear. It was impossible not to intuit what he was thinking: in the dreamers he saw not only his fate but his responsibility. Their presence was an unbearable reminder to him of what he’d done and of what he’d become. When he murmured something to Tallent and left, stalking into the woods beyond, I thought nothing of it, only that he
wanted to be alone, away from us. And why would he not want to be alone, to prolong considering the inevitability of his departure? He was returning home a cursed man. What would he say to his family?

I woke the next morning to screams, to Uva and Tu running toward us, shouting at Tallent, startled groups of bugs and birds rising up and screeching away in their wake. “Fa’a!” they were shouting “Fa’a!,” followed by something else.

He was up and running after them at once. “One of you, stay behind with the dreamers!” he called back to us, but both Esme and I bolted after him, which I later had to admit was not very wise—they could have wandered off and we might never have seen them again.

We ran, and for once the jungle, as if recognizing our panic, seemed to adjust itself to us. Our feet did not land in the hollows of roots and did not skid over the ankle-breaking rimes of moss but instead floated over every impediment, each footfall landing as cleanly and solidly as if we had been running on lawn, on tarmac.

Before us, in the distance, was a tree, an enormous makava, its branches stretched low and long like an octopus’s tentacles, and from one of them hung Fa’a. He had used a length of palm-frond rope, the same we had tied the dreamers with, and made an imperfect noose, so imperfect that when I examined him and felt his neck intact, I realized that he had suffocated and that his death had been a slow and agonizing one.

Uva and Tu were howling, their heads thrown back and their eyes seamed shut, their slabby tongues working muscularly in their mouths. Esme was crying. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, Fa’a.” Tallent looked exhausted, his face pulling itself down toward the ground, his hands hanging at his sides.

It took all of us to bring him down. Tu climbed up the tree and onto the branch and sawed at the rope with Tallent’s knife. Tallent and I caught him as he fell, and we all carried him back, Tallent and Tu on one side, the rest of us on the other, Fa’a a solid, swinging weight between us.

I had not witnessed a death the entire time I had been in the village. A birth, yes—the baby, like any other baby anywhere else in the world, had slid out, snarled with fleshy cord and colored that
particular unattractive mauve color that newborns are, as I watched, barely breathing so as not to betray my presence, from behind the hut—but not a death. So I did not know how the Ivu’ivuans would bury their dead, or even if they had many occasions to do so.
⁴⁷
But the U’ivuans’ treatment of their dead would be different from the Ivu’ivuans’ anyway, Tallent reminded me. In U’ivu they would take the body to a remote location high in the hills and leave it to be consumed by animals. Then, six months later, they would return and move the bones somewhere secret; only the deceased’s family would know the location, and they would never tell for fear that someone else would steal the bones and with them the dead person’s spirit.

But here there was no high hill nearby. That afternoon (we had kept Fa’a’s death from the dreamers) Tu and Uva took Fa’a away. They were gone for so long that, although we did not voice this fear to one another, I think we were all concerned that they might not return, even though they hated the island, and even though they had left their sack of vuakas behind. By the time they did walk back to us it was daybreak, and the sky was lightening, and we could see small dust-colored insects, their wings webbed and traced with veins so fine and yellow they looked like strands of saffron, clogging the air before and above us.

They were spent, gray-faced. They spoke to Tallent. “They’ve hidden him somewhere,” he reported to us. “They said they’d return in six months to hide his bones.” But we knew, all of us, that this would not happen, that Fa’a’s body would remain wherever they had left it, to be nibbled away at by ants and bats and birds and beetles until it was picked clean, its bones as white as butter.

In the end, we had spent so long waiting for Tu and Uva that we had to hurry the rest of the way downhill to meet the boat. Tu carried Fa’a’s spear, which he would return to his family and which would serve as evidence that he was truly gone. By the time we reached the little shore, where the water lapped so far up onto ground that there was a span of about ten yards that was not quite ocean and not quite land, where you could see the two worlds coming together into one—fish swimming above grass and orchids shimmering beneath the ocean’s oily slick—the sun was so high in the sky that for a moment I feared that the boat had already come and gone and we would be trapped here forever, too far from one civilization and unwilling to return to the other. But then we heard a far-off chugging and watched the boat materialize in the distance as a gray-brown smear before it drew closer and solidified into shape. After these months it looked, for all its crudeness, impossibly sophisticated, a creation of a bold and ingenious society. At the prow, the boatman held up his arms, and Tallent waved back to him. I wondered what the boatman would think of his extra passengers, and what the dreamers would think of the boat, and, later, what it would feel like to be on the open water, to have the ocean bouncing away beneath us. With each yard we would be drawn farther away from this place, which was already beginning to feel like a dream, a series of events and meetings that had never happened, and back toward our own society. I asked myself if I was happy about this and was surprised to find that I didn’t know that I was.

The boat was now close enough for its driver to see who we had with us, and even from the shore I could see his mouth form itself into an
O
.

“Bring them closer—get ready to board,” Tallent told us, already wading out into the shallows to help pull the boat in.

We drew them along, Tu and Uva and Esme and I, each of us holding one of the dreamers’ hands. They were reluctant to put their
feet into the water, but once they did, they let out small sighs of happiness, although Ika’ana’s hand tightened around mine, and I squeezed his back to reassure him.

“Come on,” I told him, even though he couldn’t understand, and he looked at me trustingly, his eyes mild, and it was difficult to remember that he had once been a warrior and had once carried a spear that he had protected with his life.
Ma’alamakina, ma’ama
.

We walked carefully toward the boat, the last in line. The quilt of rocks beneath us was uneven, and Ika’ana swayed a bit from the effort. I could see the boatman’s shaking hands as he touched Eve’s wrist and helped heft her up. Behind us, the jungle steamed.

But I didn’t look back.

³⁴
The villagers were engaged in their lili’ika, or “small sleep,” which traditionally begins directly after the midday meal and lasts well into the afternoon. The lili’ika was probably born as a matter of necessity; during the hot months, it was simply too difficult to get work done in the late sun. Second, Ivu’ivuans have traditionally stayed up very late at night, for it is then that the choicest hunting takes place (many of the Ivu’ivuans’ favorite game animals are nocturnal).
   Although the missionaries were, as Norton has noted, unable to win many converts, they
were
able, through the occasional envoy, to convince the king that lili’ika was somehow backward and would thwart the country’s rise; King Tuima’ele therefore abolished lili’ika in 1930, in what was to be one of the missionaries’ most significant legacies. However, the tradition persevered on Ivu’ivu because, as Norton notes, they had no knowledge of the king, much less of his kingdom.
   Norton does not significantly address King Tuimai’ele in these pages, but he was by all accounts a fascinating man. Tuima’ele was as old as the twentieth century itself (so he would have been fifty when Norton arrived on the island) and had been ruling since he was twelve. His relationship with the encroaching West was a complicated one. On one hand, he had no doubt heard stories of how his grandfather King Maku had outlawed ka’aka’a as barbaric and backward, probably under direct pressure from the Protestant missionaries who still had a small stronghold on the northern side of U’ivu. And yet he had also heard stories of his own father, King Vake’ele, who as a child monarch had thrown out the last of the missionaries in 1875, shortly after the catastrophic tsunami that destroyed most of their nascent community.
   Tuimai’ele’s reign was marked by an intense curiosity about the West—for him, it was a forbidden place, and therefore exciting—equaled only by an intense suspicion of it. It is said (although there is no written record of it) that the reason the missionaries most upset Vake’ele was that they told him in order to become Christian, he must forsake his spear. And with that one command, the settlers’ several-decades-long, stop-and-start inroads into U’ivu were halted: Vake’ele banished them, and Tuimai’ele grew up in an U’ivu completely without a white presence.
   Before they were banished, however, Vake’ele had made friends with some of the missionaries, one of whom—his name is lost to time—gave him a series of picture books, which the king is said to have passed on to his son. Although Tuimai’ele was subliterate, the books were proof of a world outside his own, and it was he who would later try to establish diplomatic outposts in various South Pacific countries.
   Unfortunately, he was not able to allow himself to commit to these overtures completely, and U’ivu spent the first part of the twentieth century in semiobscurity, falling in and out of notice in the West—until, that is, Tallent and Norton forced it into public consciousness.