The Signature of All Things

strict mistress of protocol, that one, keenly alert to manners and missteps. While everyone at the settlement loved the Reverend Welles, they feared Sister Manu. Sister Manu—whose name meant “bird”—was as tall as Alma, and as heavily muscled as a man. She could have carried Alma on her back. There were not many women about whom one could say that .
    Sister Manu always wore her broad straw hat, dressed with different fresh flowers every day, but Alma had seen during bath time in the river that Manu’s forehead was covered with a hash of blunt white scars. Two or three of the older women had similar mysterious marks on their foreheads, but Manu was scarred in another way besides: she was missing the last phalanx of each of her pinky fingers. It seemed such a strange injury to Alma, so neat and symmetrical. She could not imagine what a person could have been doing, to have lost both pinky tips so tidily. She dared not ask.
    Sister Manu was the one who rang the bell for worship every morning and evening, and the people—all eighteen of the settlement’s adults—dutifully came. Even Alma tried never to miss religious services at Matavai Bay, for it would have offended Sister Manu, and Alma could not have survived long without her favor. In any case, Alma found that the services were not difficult to sit through; they seldom lasted more than a quarter of an hour, and Sister Manu’s sermons in her stubborn English were always entertaining. (If the Lutheran gatherings in Philadelphia had been as simple and diverting as this, Alma thought, she might have become a better Lutheran.) Alma paid close attention and in due course pulled out words and phrases from the dense Tahitian-language chants.
    Te rima atua : the hand of God.
    Te mau pure atua : the people of God.
    As for the boy who had brought Alma her microscope eyepiece the first night, she learned that he was one of a pack of five small boys who roamed the mission settlement with no apparent occupation other than to play ceaselessly until they collapsed with exhaustion onto the sand, and—like dogs—slept where they fell. It took Alma weeks to tell the boys apart.The one who had shown up in her room and handed her the microscope eyepiece was, she learned, named Hiro. His hair was the longest and he seemed to hold the highest status within the gang. (She later learned that in Tahitian mythology, Hiro was the king of thieves. It amused her that her first encounter with Matavai Bay’s little king of thieves was when he returned something that had been stolen from her.) Hiro was the brother of the boy called Makea, although perhaps they were not actual brothers. They also claimed to be brothers with Papeiha and Tinomana and another Makea, but Alma thought this could not possibly be true, because all five boys appeared to be the same age and two of them had the same name. She could not for the life of her determine who their parents might be. There was not the slightest sign that anyone took care of these children but themselves.
    There were other children around Matavai Bay, but they approached life far more seriously than the five boys whom Alma came to think of as “the Hiro contingent.” These other children came to the mission school for classes in English and reading every afternoon, even if their parents were not residents of the Reverend Welles’s settlement. These were little boys with neat, short hair, and little girls with beautiful braids, long dresses, and bright smiles. They took their classes in the church, where they were taught by the bright-faced young woman who had called out to Alma on her first day, “We speak English here!” That woman’s name was Etini—“white flowers strewn along the road”—and she spoke English perfectly, with a crisp British accent. It was said she had been personally taught as a child by the Reverend Welles’s wife, and now Etini was considered the best English teacher on the entire island.
    Alma was impressed by the tidy and disciplined schoolchildren, but she was far more intrigued by the five wild and uneducated boys of the Hiro contingent. She had never before seen children as free as Hiro, Makea, Papeiha, Tinomana, and the other Makea. Tiny lords of liberty, they were, and mirthful ones at that. Like some mythical blend of fish, bird, and monkey, they seemed equally at home in the water, in the trees, and on land. They hung from vines and swung into the river with fearless cheers. They paddled out to