August 1, 2014 Volume 4 No 10

  Between Sea and Shore

  by Vanessa Fogg

  The world is filled with spirits who would take a child. The gundarram, who hide in banana trees and send out their foul breath to sicken sleeping infants. Thegargar demons with red fur and black wings, who fly through the rainforest looking for naughty children to snatch. Momimo, who appears as a little lost boy crying in the mangrove swamps, begging children and adults alike for help. There are even spirits who steal the lives of babies still in their mothers’ wombs.

  My aunties warned, scolded and threatened me with such tales. My cousins and I retold the stories we heard, alternately terrified and delighted. But my mother never warned me of the spirits of the jungle. The only ones she ever warned me against were the Nai-O, the beautiful swimmers, the shape-shifters of the sea.

  Sometimes I can see dolphins out in the bay. A flash so quick I can hardly be sure: a silver arc, a moment of flight, the curve of a leap which drags my heart along with it. Sometimes I see a pod: two and three and more leaping and spinning together, breaking again and again out of the water into the empty air. I stare at them from the shallow water near the shore, a scoop-net in my hands. I can swim, but I will never get close to them; I can’t swim that far, and I will never be allowed in the painted boats that venture out in the deeper waters beyond the reef.

  All I can do is stare.

  “Dolphin blood,” some families are said to possess. It is known that the Nai-O, who delight in taking dolphin form during the day, sometimes take human form on land at dusk. There are tales of young women seduced and left carrying half-human offspring. Men are no less lucky—they are often driven hopelessly mad by an encounter.

  “But why? Why would they even leave their home?” I asked once. I could not fathom it. There is no death in their undersea kingdom, no suffering. Beautiful music plays; the water is cool and refreshing; the Nai-O, ultimately neither dolphin nor human, laugh and dance under the waves. Some say they live in castles of coral and moon-pearls. Some say they eat fruit off plates of shining gold.

  “They’re drawn to humans,” Auntie Tippi said simply. It was the resting hour after the mid-day meal, and we lay under the thatched palm shade of Auntie’s small courtyard, too drained by the heat to move. Even my little brother was too hot to run about, and he lay draped on the ground at my feet like a beached jelly. “They’re drawn to human songs, human music.” Auntie slapped at a gnat on her arm.

  “They’re drawn to the human world because it’s different,” an older cousin guessed. “Maybe even spirits want to see new things.”

  One of the littler cousins pinched another, and wails split the air. My mother spoke quietly, so quietly that perhaps only I heard. “They’re drawn to sorrow,” she said.

  There is no shortage of sorrow in our world. Every few years a great storm batters the coast, tearing the roofs off our homes, flooding our fields, breaking our boats. There are unlucky men and boys caught and dragged under by the sea. There are people bitten by snakes and poison spiders, lost to the jungle; there are the rains that bring the coughing sickness and the sun which brings the prickly fever; there are shallow wounds that blacken and rot. The gundarramsteal the breath of babies; and there are other spirits who take the breath of laboring women and babies together with a single hand.

  There is sorrow in my household. I have always felt it. My mother goes silent and her gaze slips past me, staring at what no one else can see. She was pounding herbs and salt into a paste for dinner, but her hands have grown still. I in turn grow nervous, for Father will yell if dinner is not done to his liking.

  “Mother,” I say tentatively. I cannot predict her moods. There are days that she smiles and laughs and she is with me and my brother. But other times she snaps at us; her voice goes shrill, and she bursts into tears. She sings to herself songs from her old village, but she won’t teach them to me and gets angry when she hears me singing them in my turn.

  “Mother,” I say, and she might come back or she might not.

  Father can’t stand to see her this way. I gently take the mortar and pestle from her hands and try to finish dinner myself. I’m not as quick or skilled as she can be, and Father will grumble when he gets home. But he would grumble anyway.

  Many women have sorrows. Many women have lost children. My mother is not the only one. But she’s the only one I know who loses herself like this, who grows clumsy and forgetful even as she’s cracking open a coconut or spreading fish out on racks to dry in the sun. She is weak, I think to myself. Accursed. Why else would she lose two children still in the womb even though she wore a garland of shells and fresh sippi flowers every night? Why else would she be unlucky enough to lose my other brother to the rain-sickness when he was barely a year old? Why can’t she be like my aunties and the other women—often short-tempered and scolding yes, but also strong and stoic and always capable?

  To escape her sorrow, I run to the sea. I laugh and dive and splash with the other children. We wade in the shallows with our scoop-nets, catching crabs and small fish; at low tide we dig up clams. I’m only a girl, but I can swim faster and farther and hold my breath longer than anyone, even than Rakao, the son of the chief fisherman. He and I dare each other to swim out farther and farther, until we’re nearly at the reef and it’s just the two of us, floating on our backs in the warm still water. The blue sky tilts above like a second ocean and we’re weightless, suspended between expanses. I think that my body might go transparent with water and light. I think that I might stay like this forever. I think that I might never leave.

  Then I hear Rakao’s voice, crying out that there are dolphins.

  I turn upright to look. We see them flashing beyond the reef, past the fleet of fishing boats. A man in one of the boats is angrily waving his arm at us—Rakao’s father–gesturing at us to head back.

  So we do.

  “My father is taking me out tomorrow,” Rakao boasts when we are back on shore. “He says I am old enough now to be of some real help.”

  I am silent. It’s true; he is old enough. Rakao’s father first took him out to the reef when he was six, but such trips have not been regular occurrences. I see now that they will soon be; he will learn to use the lines and elaborate nets and traps that only the men can use, and he will spend every day on the reef or open ocean while I stay confined to the inner lagoon with the women and children.

  He doesn’t notice my silence. He’s chattering as we walk back to our homes. He heads to the chief fisherman’s house of multiple rooms, while I walk to a small house that needs new thatching for its roof. I find my little brother crying inside, hungry, and my mother just sitting on the floor, staring blankly out through the open doorway at the sea.

  They say that festival times are the riskiest for a Nai-O encounter. All the voices of a village lifted in song—the swirl of melodies, the sounds of flutes and drums—it’s like a great fire in the dark. The Nai-O hear and come. The priest always draws a protective circle around the main celebration space. The elders jealously chaperone the young maidens and youths.

  Still, there are tales. There is the story of the girl who foolishly ran home in the dark by herself to fetch a belt of shells to wear. She met a Nai-O and nine months later gave birth to a child with silver hair and fingerless hands like fins. The baby gave a single high, nearly soundless cry, and then died, unable to breathe this world’s air.

  And there is a story that took place in our own village, within living memory. Old Uncle Turo was once the handsomest youth of his time. The great-aunties sigh and shake their heads, remembering. He was brave and gifted, and reckless as only a young man can be. No one remembers how or why he slipped from the New Year’s festival. But when they found him the next morning it was already too late; the once-laughing boy was sitting empty-eyed in the sand with seaweed in his hair. He never spoke sense again. He drifted aimlessly about the village and sang at the sea; he grew old, rocking and mumbling to himself. He lives still: a silent bent man forgotten in corners, until someone chances to remember and tell the old story.

  Don’t walk by yourself at dusk, they tell the youths and maidens. Don’t sing alone near the sea.

  The aunties of the village look after my brother and me. They pull him out of the mangrove swamp and then scold me for not keeping an eye on him. They watch us alongside their own children as we play. We call all the older women of the village “Aunt,” but Auntie Tippi is our real aunt, our father’s younger sister. She reminds Mother that our small garden needs weeding, that it’s time to pull the aroroots. She tells Mother that Little Brother has outgrown all his clothes. We harvest shellfish and gather palm fronds with her family, and she and Mother weave baskets together in the late afternoon, as my brother and I play with our cousins.

  Auntie Tippi’s fingers are gentle as she threads flowers through my hair for the Harvest Festival.

  “Your mother wore flowers like these when we first met,” she says, smiling. “You’re already nearly as pretty.”

  I feel myself go still. My mother–my tired, drab mother—was once pretty?

  I’ve never heard Auntie Tippi say anything like this before. I’ve never heard anyone in the village talk of what my mother was like when she was younger, before I was born.

  “Was that at the Harvest Feast?” I ask. “When she and Father first met?”

  But my aunt looks as though she regrets her words. Sadness like a shadow flickers over her face, and she doesn’t say anything more.

  I was playing alone on the beach. I was perhaps four years old. It was the cool time of evening when families gather to enjoy the reprieve from the heat; children splash and run in the sea as their mothers sit weaving baskets and the men mend nets or clean out traps for the next day’s fishing. The fishing boats have been dragged ashore, and their painted eyes and charms glint in the day’s last light.

  I had wandered far from my friends and from any adult. Orange streaks from the falling sun lit the sky, but my feet seemed to be moving in a separate world of darkness. I watched my own feet splashing through the dimming water; I followed them, fascinated, as though I were following the appendages of some mysterious creature. And I was singing a lullaby as I went, something my mother would sometimes sing to me, a song from her own inland village.

  Kirri, kirri sing the little birds.

  They call for you in the dawn.

  Mik, mik calls the mouse in the field.

  He misses your shadow passing by.

  I was singing, and was there an echo I heard, a second voice tracing those words? I sang louder and it seemed that the waves were growing stronger. That second voice sang with me, a half-beat behind, and I could hear the curiosity in its uncertain refrain. The current sucked at my legs . . .

  And my mother was screaming my name, running at me; she grabbed me and swung me away from the water, up into her arms. “Don’t,” she cried. “Don’t ever sing that song, don’t sing here at night, don’t you know–”

  She shook me, she was so angry, and I saw the tears glinting on her cheeks. I burst into sobs.

  The Nai-O, she explained as she carried me crying back up the beach. The Nai-O, the singing dolphins, didn’t I know that they took small children?

  My friends didn’t believe me.

  “The Nai-O don’t take children,” Rakao said, frowning. “Or not little ones. They take the older ones, the ones who are almost grown.”

  “Everyone knows that,” an older boy, Kaavo, scoffed.

  “My mother said so,” I insisted.

  Kaavo tapped the side of his head with two fingers, the same gesture people made when they spoke of Old Uncle Turo. “My mother says your mother is crazy,” Kaavo said.

  My mother was not crazy. Not then.

  Back then she still sang to me, and stroked my hair, and held me in her arms. She spoke and listened and looked at the world, even if her eyes were sometimes scared and sad.

  I kicked that boy in the shins for disrespecting one of his elders.

  The seasons blur–planting and harvest and sun and rains and sometimes a cool breeze off the sea, stirring the air. The Four Great Festivals slowly wheel around in their turn. There are harvest seasons for fish as well as aro and rice—there are times when the large spotted specka run, and a full moon when huge schools of berbekki throw themselves into the fishermen’s nets. Rakao tells me of all this when we meet. He tells me of the great green turtle nearly as large as a man, whom they call “Grandfather,” and who greets them every day on the reef. He talks of bright fishes with colors and patterns I’ve never seen—too clever and quick to be caught. He speaks of undersea forests of coral. He tells me of rowing past the reef into choppy water, of feeling the boat rise and fall; the lurch in the stomach, the great rolling hills and valleys of water.

  Father takes Little Brother out to sea as well, although not often. He’s not a patient man, and Little Brother gets bored and restless in the confines of the boat.

  Rakao meets me at the beach as the sun is setting. He tells me of the pod of dolphins he saw, closer than he’s ever seen. He gives me a piece of pink coral.

  How do you tell a Nai-O from an ordinary dolphin?

  The differences are subtle. Some say the Nai-O are slightly larger. Others claim that they are smaller. All agree that their skin is brighter, more silvery. They leap just a little higher in the air, cut through the water just a little more swiftly. They are curious and fearless, and often swim alongside boats. At sea, the Nai-O are almost considered good luck; they often bring good weather and fish.

  Still, it’s best to keep your distance. It’s best not to draw their attention.

  Rakao says he’s never seen one, but promises to tell me if he does.

  When the rains fall, it’s time to light candles for the dead. On the family altar Mother places coconut shells of fresh water and jasmine flowers. We peel and cut guava fruit as an offering. We kneel and recite prayers for our relatives’ well-being and blessings: ancestors I’ve never known, my father’s parents, and their parents in turn. My father’s siblings who died in childhood, and his older brother who died before I was born. We and Auntie Tippi are all that’s left of his family.

  In my mother’s village they pray for her ancestors and family, but here she makes offerings for her husband’s. She and Father’s lost children are the last names to be spoken. Her tears start before she gets to her first son’s name; she’s crying as she lights the candle for Father’s older brother, for an uncle I never knew.

  The stories always leave something out. What happened to the girl with the belt of shells, after she gave birth to her Nai-O baby? What happened to the half-Nai-O children who survived, whose descendants are said to live in certain villages on the coast? Were they happy? Did their mothers love them? Did they ever long to leave their human families and go to live in the sea?

  Rakao and I meet when we can. It’s hard, for we’re both busy with new duties. It’s been years since we swam in the lagoon together. Long ago, I was told to put on a maiden’s proper clothes, to leave the sea to unshirted little girls.

  But we can still meet on land, for a short space each day. We can still talk and be together.

  We’re almost always surrounded by others—family and friends gathered around us on the beach or working with us during chores. But there are still moments when we catch each other alone during the daily routine—moments when he still seeks me out, meeting me by my home. He spends most of his time with the other boys, of course; working with them, trading cheerful insults with them, kicking around a woven rattan-ball. But I know he speaks truly only to me. We stare at the sea and wonder aloud about the islands across the water. He tells me the stories he hears from visiting sea-traders. He talks of running away to join them. He tells me of a quarrel in his family, of something his father said. He speaks of the expectations of his father and of the expectations of all his uncles. It’s like a dozen eyes always watching you, he complains; it’s like the heat of the sun always on your back. And then suddenly we’re laughing at his imitation of a stern old uncle; we’re laughing at an auntie’s manner, and at some silly happenstance; we’re laughing at nothing at all.

  I ask him to tell me of the sea.

  He smiles. “You’re the one who should be on the boat each day,” he says.

  Later, I watch as he swims freely in the lagoon with his friends. I think of a game that the two of us used to play. When we were children, we built a great boat out of palm fronds and branches: the greatest boat that has ever been, a deep-sea voyaging canoe with sails like white wings. We stocked that boat with coconuts, and Rakao caught a shark to tow us, and we sailed across the ocean itself to the lands beyond the sunset.

  I heard two new Nai-O stories last year. It was at the Clear Moon Festival, and I heard them from a girl from M’kai village. She was visiting with her family, honored guests of one of our chief families. She told us the stories as she and her mother helped with the feast preparations: pounding roots, shelling nuts, and folding countless banana leaves around fillings of sweet rice and fruit. A story! we demanded while we worked, for it was the fee asked of all visitors. The girl smiled demurely and glanced at her mother. The woman nodded, and the girl, clearly proud to tell a story she had learned well, told her tale.

  Long ago in M’kai village there lived a gentle young man. He was kind and well-liked, a good fisherman and hard worker. But he was also an odd, dreamy youth, prone to spells of silence and unexplained sadness.

 

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