DEATHLESS

Here is what happened, how the man was lost. Here is how he lived through death, how he came to live on the dark rock and to pass memories through his heart.

First there was the war and it was in Vietnam and few of our people had ever heard of that small country before. They knew little of the war except small things on the news. This is a small reserve, village, or town, as some prefer to call it, one with old houses staggered here and there on the flats and on hillsides or near the river. Nothing in Dark River is given to straight lines or planning. The roads curve up one hill and down another. The roofs are of faded blue material on some of the small wooden houses, the blue that was once brighter than sky or water. Other homes are covered with red, also pale so that the colors look like those of dusk and dawn. The houses, sitting here and there, hold people who have grown together, all with the same histories like one tree with the same roots and fallen leaves. They have ancestors in common, most of them. Even the dogs running after food together or sleeping in the winding roads look like they descended from the same Adam and Eve of dogs.

Then there was Ruth, the woman Thomas Witka Just had married in a tribal ceremony on the beach. What a wedding! All their friends were there. It was even said the fish attended, making the water shine with their silver leaps and splashes.

Ruth and Thomas had known each other all their lives and it was inevitable, all thought, that they would marry. As a woman, Ruth inherited a well-boned face, the kind that is beautiful photographed but looks sharp in person, like she was carved by the winds that blow there. As an infant, Ruth was born with gill slits. It had happened before, children being born with gills, but her mother, Aurora, said, “It’s an omen. I don’t know what, but I don’t like it. She’s bound for water, this one. Like her father.” She was afraid her daughter might die. In or out of water, at first it seemed she wouldn’t live either way. The midwife had to keep the baby girl in a zinc tub filled with water so she wouldn’t drown in air before they took her to a doctor in town. The gills were right in front of her ears. The doctors were baffled and it took many weeks to sew the gills together and keep Ruth Small breathing through her lungs. Later it seemed she heard things others didn’t. She heard through water, schools of fish and the whales before they surfaced.

Ruth Small, granddaughter of Akita-si, Witka’s friend and the other beneath-the-water man, was anything but small. Large in spirit, strong in hand, big in heart, she was a tall girl, taller than Thomas until he caught up and finally outgrew the leggy young woman, and then one night kissed her and their love was sealed, lip to lip.