The Signature of All Things

yet none seemed especially intrigued by her presence, and none talked with her for long. All reiterated the same piece of information: that the Reverend Francis Welles was in the corral for the day. And what time would he be back from the corral? Nobody knew. Before dark, they all dearly hoped.
    A few young boys gathered round Alma and played a daring game of tossing pebbles at her luggage, and sometimes at her feet, until a large older woman with a glowering face chased them away, and they dashed off to play in the river. As the day wore on, some men with tiny fishing poles walked past Alma down to the beach and waded into the sea. They stood up to their necks in the gently rolling surf, casting about for fish. Her thirst and hunger had become urgent. Still, she did not dare go wandering and leave her belongings behind.
    Dusk comes on fast in the tropics. Alma had already learned this in her months at sea. The shadows grew longer. The children ran out of the river and dashed back inside their cottages. Alma watched the sun lowering swiftly over the steep peaks of the island of Moorea, far across the bay. She began to panic. Where would she sleep tonight?Mosquitoes flitted around her head. She was now invisible to the Tahitians. They went about their business around her, as if she and her luggage were a stone cairn that had stood there on the beach since the dawn of history itself. The evening swallows emerged from the trees to hunt. Light glared off the water in dazzling blazes from the setting sun.
    Then Alma saw something in the water, something heading toward the beach. It was a small outrigger canoe, quick and narrow. She shaded her eyes with her hand and squinted against the reflected sunlight, trying to make out the figures inside. No, it was just one figure, she saw, and that figure was paddling most energetically. The canoe shot up onto the beach with remarkable force—a little arrow of perfect momentum—and out sprang an elf. Or such was Alma’s first thought: Here is an elf! Further scrutiny, however, revealed the elf to be a man, a white man, with a wild corona of snowy hair and a fluttering beard to match. He was tiny and bowlegged and spry, and he hauled the canoe up the beach with surprising strength for one so small.
    “Reverend Welles?” she shouted with hope, waving her arms in a gesture that utterly lacked dignity.
    The man approached. It was difficult to say what was more remarkable about him—his diminutive stature or his gaunt frame. He was half the size of Alma, with a child’s body, and a quite skeletal body, at that. His cheeks were hollow and his shoulders were sharp and pointed beneath his shirt. His trousers were held around his pinched waist by a doubled-up length of rope. His beard reached far down his chest. He was wearing some sort of strange sandals, also made of rope. He did not wear a hat, and his face was deeply sunburned. His clothes were not entirely in rags, but quite nearly. He looked like a broken parasol. He looked like an elderly, miniature castaway.
    “Reverend Welles?” she asked again, hesitant as he drew nearer.
    He looked up at her— far up at her—with frank and bright blue eyes. “I am the Reverend Welles,” he said. “At least, I believe that I still am, you see!”
    He spoke with a light, clipped, indeterminate British accent.
    “Reverend Welles, my name is Alma Whittaker. I hope you received my letter?”
    He tilted his head: birdlike, interested, unperturbed. “Your letter?”
    It was just as she had feared. She was not expected here. She took a deep breath and tried to think how best to explain herself. “I have come to visit, Reverend Welles, and to perhaps stay for a while—as you can probably see.” She made an apologetic gesture toward her pyramid of luggage. “I have an interest in natural botany and I would like to study your native plants. I know that you are something of a naturalist yourself. I come from Philadelphia, in the United States. I have also come to survey the vanilla plantation my family owns. My father was Henry Whittaker.”
    He raised his wispy white eyebrows. “Your father was Henry Whittaker, do you say?” he asked. “Has that good man passed away?”
    “I’m afraid he has, Reverend Welles. Just this last year.”
    “I regret to hear it. May the Lord take him to His breast. I worked for your father over the years, you see, in my own small way. I sold him many specimens, for which he was kind enough to pay me