Marshall Islands Chronicles, Post-Script: Pissing on the Dead

The Marshallese, being a family-oriented society with little in the way of available land space, almost always bury their dead at home. Just about every house you see there has two or three dusty white headstones in the yard, high rectangular graves with rectangular markers rising from one end. My host family's home was no different--there were three gravestones on their property, the closest being maybe six feet from my bedroom window. Nothing says, "Welcome to your home for the year" quite like three dead people to share your personal space with.

Their presence at first presented me with one of my more serious ethical dilemmas--others included "Should I eat this endangered sea turtle that's been served to me?" (guilty) and "Is it morally defensible to tape two seven-year-olds together who won't stop brawling, in the spirit of teaching them a lesson about cooperation?" (doubly guilty). Anyway, the dilemma presented by the three deceased housemates was, namely, whether or not it was okay to just piss out my bedroom window at night despite my proximity to their final resting places. The alternative, mind you, was to try to make my way through the pitch dark in an unfamiliar house with a full bladder, undo a series of knots that functioned as a lock, and take care of business before negotiating the same process in reverse. While also trying not to step on the sleeping forms of my three host siblings, who used the floor as a shared bed. Mind you, Marshallese dark was not like American dark. There was no light pollution there, no headlights going by, nothing. Once it was dark you better have known where you were.

As so often (unfortunately) happens, convenience trumped my moral platitudes in this case. I decided a few weeks into my stay on Aur that I would just let fly out the window, so to speak, should a middle-of-the-night situation arise.

This system worked out just fine for me from August to February, with a few notable exceptions. These usually involved me grossly misjudging the time of night (having gone to bed at 8:45 for lack of light or social options) and thinking it was a lot later than it really was. I would assume I was in the clear and proceed with my nightly micturating, only to have someone in my host family come around the side of the house and witness a thin stream emerging from the dark conspicuous frame of my window--it being, say, 10 pm and not 2 am as I had imagined. To their credit, they never once mentioned it to me. This I took as early evidence that we were going to get on just fine.

(PSA: this longwinded story is about to go from lighthearted to soul-crushingly bleak.)

As I said, my system worked well into February--a full six months of urinary freedom. But on the morning of February 16th, a Saturday, I woke up to the sound of men shouting and shoveling right outside my window. I was pissed off at the chaos for about three minutes before getting up to see what the commotion was. I didn't pull back my window curtain; rather, I got dressed and went out the door and around the house. What I saw felt like a sucker punch to the gut, a complete reflex that occurred before I had even finished processing what I was looking at.

A group of the men had dug a shallow trench, maybe six feet long, in the earth directly under my bedroom window. Lying in the trench was a woman, and it was immediately clear that she was no longer alive. I went out of my head for about ten seconds, just not processing or hearing anything clearly. When this wave passed I sprinted over to my school's principal, standing among the men, to ask what in God's name had happened. He explained that she had been sleeping in one of the small tin outbuildings on the next door neighbors' property, and an enormous breadfruit tree had collapsed and crushed it. Breadfruit trees generally run pretty big, with sturdy and visible roots, but there had been a colossal windstorm the night before and it had come loose. Help had come to her too late, and she never woke up. She died in the little trench as the men attempted to minister to her with medicines both modern and traditional. I should selfishly mention that my cot rested against the 1/2"-thick piece of particle board which served as a wall of the house, meaning that their ministrations and her death had happened less than a foot away from where I was sleeping. I probably don't need to explain how that made and still makes me feel.

The woman in question, Kathleen (pronounced Cat-a-lane by the Marshallese) was the mother of two of my students and the aunt of about nine others. The gut-punch I got was clearly nothing compared to the one received by the entire community, who had known her for her entire life. Everyone is family on an islands like that, in both a communal and biological sense, so when someone dies everyone loses a neighbor, a friend, a grandmother, a child. It is a strange, strange feeling to be a relative outsider in the midst of such deep-seated grief. From the events that transpired following Kathleen's passing, however, I learned two very important aspects of Marshallese culture. These simultaneously made me feel like part of their communal family (because they let me into something intensely personal and emotional), and like even more of an outsider (because I could not in the least relate to how they were handling things). Allow me to explain.

The first thing I learned is that the Marshallese, despite their passionate Christian beliefs (thanks to generations of missionary influence), are afraid of nothing except ghosts.  They swim with and kill sharks, climb limbless 50-foot coconut trees, and sail vast expanses of ocean in canoes that look like they barely float, all without batting an eye. But the possibility of a ghost--a timon (bastardized from demon)--puts them right over the edge. They cannot cope. This particularly applies to the children. After Kathleen passed away in my backyard, the kids of Aur basically foreswore the whole property for weeks. It became taboo. It took more than two months for any of my host siblings to even sleep in the house again, and only then with a solar flashlight running all night. I was regarded by my students as some mixture of crazy and heroic for continuing to sleep in my room and using that side of the house at all. For my part, I mostly just felt terrible for Tammy and Darrel (Kathleen's kids, my students) that their friends had turned their mother into the village bogey-woman. Despite all their charms, kids are occasionally just as capable of being shitty to each other as adults are.

The other thing I learned was the process by which the Marshallese grieve. Funerals are just about the only time you will ever see an outer-islander exhibit any kind of sadness. Marshallese adults simply do not cry, ever, with this one exception. It's a cultural sticking point that I really can't identify with in the least. The kids, like kids anywhere, cry all the time over hurts real and imagined, but by the time they reach age fifteen or so the ability to act on that impulse is almost entirely gone. The Marshallese are also not an outwardly affectionate people in the physical sense, ever, so it was beyond bizarre for me to be at the house that day and see upwards of forty people milling around in the presence of a dead body without a single hug being issued or tear being shed. We often forget how thick the American lens through which we view the world is, and this was one of the times that my cultural bias was readily apparent. It was truly surreal. My clumsy attempts at comforting Tammy and Darrel made me feel even more out of place, like I had just stumbled into a meeting that I wasn't supposed to know was taking place. They all just sat there, looking kind of dazed.

Like I said, there was zero crying before the funeral. What we would call "calling hours", the Marshallese call the ilomeji.  That word literally breaks down to "I see dead person/people." Eat your heart out, Bruce Willis. The ilomej went on all afternoon the following day and a vigil was kept over the body all night, until the next morning's funeral service and burial. Just before the coffin was lowered into the ground I saw my first adult Marshallese tears. It was chilling. To see such reserved women absolutely lose it, all at once, was hard to watch. It wasn't so much weeping as it was screaming. Kathleen's family pounded the lid of the coffin as they mourned, clinging to it until the last possible second.

What sprang to mind as this was all happening, as I was handed a shovel to help with the burial, was a crystal-clear memory of twelfth-grade AP Latin. The year's task had been translating Virgil's Aeneid, and the entire class had struggled with the parsing of a passage describing the sacking and burning of Troy. Our teacher, the brilliant Dr. James Hunt, told us that in English the words we couldn't grasp referred to something called ululating. Dr. Hunt said that he could explain what it meant, but we probably wouldn't truly understand because we had no cultural frame of reference for it. American women display grief in all manner of ways, but generally not with the ululations, rending of clothes, or pounding of the breasts in sorrow, as these Asiatic women had done in antiquity and the Marshallese women were still doing today. It is a gesture suited to the most unspeakable sadnesses possible. Speaking of Latin, Seneca had a saying for this: "Light griefs are loquacious, the great are dumb."

It's worth noting that the whole process, from death to burial, was over in about twenty-six hours. Being on island time (as they will proudly tell you), the Marshallese typically don't put on a shirt without three days of hemming and hawing, delays, and schedule changes, so the fact that something as momentous and important as a funeral could be pulled off so quickly was a borderline miracle. Perhaps this speaks to the hard life of the Marshallese throughout history, a catalogue full of short lives and unpleasant deaths in an impossibly unforgiving setting. I was and am humbled and grateful that they deigned to give me so much of themselves throughout the year. This particularly comes to mind when reflecting on how they were all so accommodating and thoughtful in the midst of their mourning--at a time when they had every reason to be resentful of the intruder on their grief, they still insisted on feeding me before themselves, giving me a seat of honor at the funeral, and allowing me to help shovel the earth that put Kathleen in her final resting place.

From that day forward I figured it was only right that I should never again piss in the presence of their honored dead.

Untitled Story, Chapter 1

(This is the first draft of the first chapter of an as-yet untitled story I've been working on. Any and all feedback is welcome! Later chapters draw on my experiences in the Marshall Islands, in a re-imagined sort of way.)

When Jacques Hyrax was a boy, he would often wake in the night feeling as though his bed had moved. It was not uncommon for him to feel the motion of waves rolling beneath his mattress as a whiff of salt air filled his nostrils, or for the frosty blasts of a snowstorm to howl by just outside what might have been a cave tucked away in a mountain. Of course, the bed never really went anywhere, but such is the kind of imagination that, if it is cultivated and allowed to grow tall, produces the kind of people who go on grand adventures and have many tales to tell. Jacques Hyrax was of just such a mind. He would eventually go on to have adventures of the sort that he had imagined as a boy (some of which will be related here), or else there would be no tale to tell, but life is long and can be dull in the early going when one is unable to get out and see the world.   For now, what we should note first is that Jacques eventually had a son. The son was named Solomon, and he too happened to be the sort of boy who woke in the night feeling as though his bed had transported him somewhere both strange and wonderful. 

On the occasions that Solomon Hyrax would wake with this feeling, he would lay awake for awhile with his head and torso out of the covers until the sounds of pounding surf or howling wind or driving snow faded back into the recesses of his imagination. This did not always come quickly or easily, and if sleep refused to come he would slip out of bed and pad softly down his hall to the top of the stairs. Because he was quick and slender he made no noise in doing so, which allowed him to scan, unnoticed, the familiar sight of the ground floor below him. 

More often than not, he would peer down and see his father sitting in his favorite armchair in front of the wavering embers of a dying fire in the fireplace. On the infrequent times that he deigned to speak to the son, his father was kind, though rarely cheerful, and on those fire-lit nights the older Hyrax wore the thousand-yard stare of a man who had seen and done strange and regretful things. Of course young boys rarely have much to really regret, and as such Solomon was only vaguely aware of what might be stirring behind his father's glassy distant eyes. But it didn't take a lifetime out in the world to recognize that all was not settled in the mind of the private, solitary man who had raised him. 

He had noticed that when the two of them would walk into town together, down the dirt road flanked by towering ancient trees and across two winding hills before coming to the cobbled street of smiths and bakers and chemists, that people on the street always gave his father a wide berth. The older Hyrax had a distant stare for these occasions too, though it was not the stare of a man lost in thought so much as one of shutting out the world before it could do the same turn to him. Solomon could not remember his father wearing anything other than sleeves that buttoned all the way to the wrists and shirts with high stiff collars, even on the warmest of these days in the town, and he always supposed the townspeople's stares might have had something to do with the odd fashion in which his father chose to dress. 

The two of them would run these errands perhaps once a week, the fiercely bearded towering man and the tall slight youth. Anyone watching them would have known them as family only by their matching shocks of red hair. Otherwise they could not have been more dissimilar--the man hawk-nosed and muscular, the boy elfin-featured and lean, with a deep tan to his skin even in the winter months. Jacques' eyes smoldered turquoise blue, while his son's were the grey of a stormcloud out across some distant sea. The assumption of the townspeople had always been that the boy's looks favored his mother's, though none of them could ever recall seeing or knowing her. For that matter, neither could the boy.

They said little as a rule on these excursions, for although his father had never forbade his asking questions, young Solomon seemed to sense intuitively that intrusions into the pensive mind of the older man were unwelcome. The man went about his business quickly and firmly, often stopping in a number of stores and buildings marked by words that the boy was unable to understand. He had never been taught to read, and his education had consisted entirely of learning the paths of the forest behind his house, the calls and cries of any number of wild animals, and the climbing of trees. 

They had no neighbors near their house, a two-story structure of pink-tinged stone, as their property was bounded by forest on two sides and rolling fields of grass and clover on two others. As such Solomon had no friends, but he also did not know the want of them. He passed his hours at home going about the chores his father set for him, or learning every inch of the forest, or building model ships in his room. He had never been on a ship, or even seen one in person, but they often appeared in his dreams. If it could be said that the boy felt he was missing anything in his life, it would be the absence of ships and the sea in his landlocked existence. 

                                                                   .   .   .   .   .

Very little changed in the life of Solomon Hyrax until he was fifteen years old. The passage of time marked itself, of course, with the changing of the leaves on the tapestry of trees that blanketed his father's land, from green to a palette of reds and golds until all fell off for the winter. Such has time always passed in that part of the world, with the townspeople harvesting the dead and dying trees to heat their cottages through the oft-blustery winters. The boy relished snowy afternoons when his chores were finished, for he welcomed the challenge of climbing trees whose branches had iced over in the night and were prone to dumping their snowy burdens at the touch of a hand. Still he loved these adventures most, because something was moved deep inside of him at the touch of his ungloved hands on the frozen steely arms of oak and ash. He could sense, intuitively, the dormant life and warmth of these wooden sentinels that lay beneath their icy exteriors. These treks were often followed at night by bed-moving dreams, sometimes to far-flung tropical islands under the blistering sun or sand-swept desert vistas that seemed to stretch on forever. His dream sensations, he found, rarely matched the season. 

The winter months of Solomon's fifteenth year gradually passed into spring (too quickly, in his opinion) and green gradually returned to the countryside. The boy found that the only good thing about the melting of the snow was that his walks to town became considerably more pleasant when he wasn't tramping through a knee-high blanket of snow crusted over with frost. Upon returning home he would kick his dew-covered boots off into the grass and tramp barefooted up the stone stairs to his room, pushing the slatted window open and feeling the breeze drifting through the window, still clinging to winter's last icy suggestion. Solomon pictured ships in some distant harbor setting out again, sails unfurled by hard-living men who spoke roughly but knew their vessels like parts of themselves, venturing fearlessly into waters still mapped by the broken ice floes that drifted and bobbed in the unforgiving green waters. 

It was on one of these days in the early spring, as the far-off sea rolled and crackled under its frigid covering, that just such a man came to the boy's house. In later years he would remember it as the day that marked the real and true start of his strange adventurous life. 

                                                                      .   .   .   .   .

The small hard man sat with Solomon's father all night, as far as the boy could tell. It had been early afternoon when he had arrived, the youth having only just finished his small neat lunch when the raps on the heavy wooden door began echoing off the stone walls and flagstones throughout the house. It seems prudent to note that, though anyone else would have known what ceaseless banging at the outside of a door on a pleasant afternoon might mean, Solomon was hopelessly confused by the noise. As far as he could remember, no such thing had ever occurred at his home before. His memory did in fact serve him correctly (those boys who dream vividly also having excellent memories, as a rule). The Hyrax household had not received a visitor once in his fifteen years, and he had been quite unsure of what was happening. 

Dumbstruck as he was, he had remained quite stationary in his father's favorite easy chair, a seat upon which his legs had only recently started reaching the floor, and had stared across the ground floor at the front door. He had gazed past the myriad maps and charts that adorned the sitting room's walls, past the large strange bones and fangs that ornamented his father's dusty soaring bookshelves, to the door which had creaked slowly open. His father had approached the door with measured pace as the afternoon sunlight illuminated the visitor from behind, casting his entire visage in shadow as he had stepped unasked into the house. Solomon had found his legs then, and had bolted up the stairs to his room as quickly as they would carry him. 

Toward midnight, as the moon poured silver light through the boy's window, he rose from his bed and crept, like so many other nights, to the top of the well-worn staircase. His father and the stranger sat facing one another, chairs barely a foot apart, speaking rapidly in low voices. Though he could not say for sure, Solomon believed that this new man was telling his father something urgently, something that his father was unwilling to believe as true. Smoke poured from their mouths and pipes as the conversation continued, but there was little for Solomon to make out. He was immediately inclined to distrust this visitor to their quiet home. Something seemed unsettling in the man's eyes, which darted constantly from side to side in their thick hooded lids. The boy had never seen anyone dress in such a strange rough manner, his pants in tatters and his blue coat low-collared and dirty. Nor had he ever encountered a man whose beard was plaited as this man's was. Though thick and grey, it bore intricate braids from the jawbone to its tip, and the smoke of the stranger's pipe seemed to meld with the beard, to change its shape into a shimmering and substanceless cloud of silver. 

Solomon eventually returned to his room, sleep finally coming despite the moon's brightness through his open window. He felt as though he had only dozed a moment when he awoke to the rough hand of his father on his shoulder. The older man was firmly shaking him awake, whispering his name with urgency.

"Solomon Hyrax! Wake up, child!"

Solomon sat bolt upright upon hearing the strained quality of his father's voice, rippling with an almost fearful tone. The sun had not yet started to rise above the horizon, and the dewy air pouring forth through the open window lent a chill to his body deep down as he came awake from a sleep in which his bed had gone nowhere. 

"Father! What time is it?"

"Never you mind that just now. Up, child! Up!"

Solomon clambered out of bed to find clothes laid out for him on his desk's chair, a sturdy wooden contraption with a seat well-worn from his years sitting, thinking, playing at it. He was astonished to see that his small trunk was by the door, already packed full, and his small heart sank at the thought that his father might be sending him away. What could have happened? Had their visitor demanded he be taken away?

Groggily, he lifted the trunk (in only one hand; though he had never taken a trip before, he had often hefted it in quiet restless moments as he daydreamed of what might lay out in the world, and until this past year this exercise had always required a two-handed effort) and hurried clumsily to the stairs and down them. A little ways down the path, he could just make out the shape of a horse and carriage in the predawn gloom. It was this that his father hurried him towards with breathless haste. The previous afternoon's visitor was seated at the reins, and barely glanced at Solomon as he hoisted his trunk into the carriage and jumped in behind it. A terrifyingly uncertain moment passed in the boy's mind as the thought of his forced flight began to settle in his mind, but it was partially dispelled seconds later as his father dashed around the carriage and jumped in on the other side with a trunk of his own. He banged twice on the inside roof of the carriage, and it leapt to life in an instant as the horse sped off recklessly down the path. Having only ever walked the path to the village, and everywhere else to boot, Solomon was at once thrilled and frightened by the speed and novelty of the vehicle. His father said nothing, and as always Solomon thought it better not to ask, though the older man's eyes were lit with a strange frenzied glow that didn't seem to match his tight, grim expression. 

The town was called Naweego and on that morning Solomon Hyrax knowingly set foot outside it for the first time in his fifteen years. Although perhaps 'set foot' is the wrong way to describe it, as the boy and his father were pulled the entire way--through fresh morning hills, dirt roads, and dewy meadows-- in the roughly hewn carriage driven by the strange little man who had arrived the previous afternoon.