The Signature of All Things

specifically. She wondered how long these transactions took, and where they occurred. She wondered where the sailors went if they wanted to purchase boys instead of girls. There was no sign of that sort of exchange on the dock. Probably it happened in a more discreet place.
    She saw all manner of infants and children—in and out of clothes, in and out of the water, in and out of her way. The children moved like schools of fish, or flocks of birds, with every decision rendered in immediate, collective concurrence: Now we shall jump! Now we shall run! Now we shall beg! Now we shall mock! She saw an old man with a leg inflamed to twice its natural size. His eyes were white from blindness. She saw tiny carriages, pulled by the saddest little ponies imaginable. She saw a group of small brindled dogs tangling with each other in the shade. She saw three French sailors, arm in arm, singing lustily, drunk already on this fine morning. She saw signs for a billiards hall, and, remarkably, a printing shop. The solid land swayed beneath her feet. She was hot in the sun.
    A handsome black rooster spotted Alma and marched toward her with an officious strut, as though he were an emissary dispatched to welcome her. He was so dignified that she would not have been surprised had he worn a ceremonial sash across his chest. The rooster stopped directly in front of her, magisterial and watchful. Alma nearly expected him to speak, or demand to see her documents. Not knowing what else to do, she reached down and stroked the courtly bird, as if he were a dog. Astonishingly, he allowed it. She stroked him some more, and he clucked at her in rich satisfaction. Eventually the rooster settled at her feet and fluffed out his feathers in handsome repose. He showed every sign of feeling that their interaction had gone precisely according to plan. Alma felt comforted, somehow, by this simple exchange. The rooster’s quietude and assurance helped put her at ease.
    Then the two of them—bird and woman—waited together silently on the docks, waiting for whatever would happen next.
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    I t was seven miles between Papeete and Matavai Bay. Alma took such pity on the poor pony who had to haul her luggage that she stepped out of thecarriage and walked along beside it. It was exquisite to use her legs after so many stagnant months at sea. The road was lovely and shaded overhead by a latticework of palms and breadfruit trees. The landscape felt both familiar and confounding to Alma. Many of the palm varieties she recognized from her father’s greenhouses, but others were mysterious concoctions of pleated leaves and slippery, leathery bark. Having known palms only in greenhouses, Alma had never before heard palm trees. The sound of the wind through their fronds was like rustling silk. Sometimes, in the stronger gusts, their trunks creaked like old doors. They were all so loud and alive. As for the breadfruit trees, they were grander and more elegant than she would ever have imagined. They looked like the elms of home: glossy and magnanimous.
    The carriage driver—an old Tahitian man with a disturbingly tattooed back and a well-oiled chest—was perplexed by Alma’s insistence on walking. He seemed to fear this meant he wouldn’t be paid. To reassure him, she tried to pay him halfway to their destination. This brought only more confusion. Captain Terrence had negotiated a price beforehand, but that arrangement now looked to be void. Alma offered payment in American coins, but the man attempted to make change for her from a handful of dirty Spanish piastres and Bolivian pesos. Alma could not figure out how he was possibly calculating this currency exchange, until she realized he was trading in his dull old coins for her shiny new ones.
    She was deposited in a fringe of shade under a banana grove in the middle of the mission settlement at Matavai Bay. The carriage driver stacked her luggage into a tidy pyramid; it looked just as it had looked seven months earlier, outside the carriage house at White Acre. Left alone, Alma took in her surroundings. It was a pleasant enough situation here, she thought, though more modest than she had imagined. The mission church was a humble little structure, whitewashed and thatched, surrounded by a small cluster of similarly whitewashed and thatched cottages. There couldn’t have been more than a few dozen people altogether living there.
    The community, such as it was, was built along the banks of a small river that