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.