coming home from all the wars,

and for my brother,

Larry Henderson.

CONTENTS

Prologue

PART ONE

Octopus

Deathless

Body Lies

The Wife of Marco Polo

Marco: The Son of Thomas

Ruth

Dark River: 1988

Hunt

Dark Houses

PART TWO

He Builds the Fence

The Rain Priest

After the Rain

He Goes Beneath

Out There

Light-years

Red Fish: Human

Home

PART THREE

The Wall: The Names

Ruth Watching

DOA: Department of the Army: Rooms

The Day of Tranquillity

The Man Who Killed the Whale

Stirrings Underneath

Acknowledgments

PROLOGUE

We live on the ocean. The ocean is a great being. The tribe has songs about the ocean, songs to the ocean. It is a place where people’s eyes move horizontally because they watch the long, wide sea flow into infinity. Their eyes follow the width and length of the world. Black rocks rise out of the ocean here and there, lending themselves to stories of sea monsters that might have consumed mere mortals. Several islands along the coast are tree-covered green jewels. The nearby fishing towns are now abandoned, as is the sawmill in disrepair, the forest missing. Down the beach a ways to the south, white piles, shining piles of clam and oyster shells were left behind by the earlier people, the Mysterious Ones, who were said to have built houses of shells, perfectly pieced together. These places truly existed, the secret places where houses were made of shells. Royal ships once anchored there; those who kept journals said the houses were made of pearls. No one sees them now except as a memory made of words. One man passing by at sunset wrote, in 1910, that they were made of rainbows, but of course no one believed him. This was also the year the deadly influenza arrived with the white whalers. The houses of shells were covered in a mudslide that same year.

Even the land gives in to history.

Out in the water, in the uplift of black stones, caves are left open and revealed when the tide is out, but there are caves on land also. A pile of treasures still remains in one cleft in black rock where once, not long ago, the old revered man, Witka, used to enter the cold sea naked and converse with whales, holding his breath for long periods of time. “Stay away from there,” the mothers tell their children, making it all the more enticing, and when no one looks, the children go through the offerings left there, tobacco, black shining stones created when lightning struck sand, a glass float from the other side of the ocean. On some beaches are the broken bones of long-ago boats, skeletons of carved wood, even with ribs, that are broken dreams of poor men’s labor. Almost everything from the boats that could be used has been taken years ago. Old and porous whalebones were also used inland as grave markers for the last generations, now as fences for flower gardens, and for occasional carving.