The Signature of All Things

the reef on little wooden boards and then, incredibly, they stood up on those boards, and sailed across the foaming, billowing, breaking waves. They called this activity faheei ,and Alma could not imagine thenimbleness and confidence they must have felt to ride the breaking surf with such ease. Back on the beach, they boxed and wrestled each other tirelessly. Another favorite game was when they would build stilts for themselves, cover their bodies with some kind of white powder, prop open their eyelids with twigs, and chase each other across the sand like tall, queer monsters. They also flew the uo— a kite made of dried palm fronds. At quieter moments, they played a game like jacks, using small stones instead of jacks. They kept as pets a rotating menagerie of cats, dogs, parrots, and even eels (the eels were bricked up into watery pens in the river; at the sound of the boys’ whistles, they would raise their heads up eerily above the surface of the water, ready to be fed bits of fruit by hand). Sometimes the Hiro contingent ate their pets, skinning them and roasting them on a makeshift spit. Eating dog was common practice here. The Reverend Welles told Alma that Tahitian dog was just as tasty as English lamb—but then again, the man had not tasted English lamb in decades, so she was not sure he could be trusted. Alma hoped nobody would eat Roger.
    For Roger, Alma had learned, was the name of the little dog that had visited her that first night in her fare. Roger did not seem to belong to anyone, but apparently he had been somewhat fond of Ambrose, who had bestowed upon him his dignified, robust name. Sister Etini explained all this to Alma, along with this unsettling bit of advice: “Roger will never bite you, Sister Whittaker, unless you try to feed him.”
    For the first few weeks of Alma’s stay, Roger came to her small room night after night, to bark at her with all his heart. For a long time, she never saw him during the day. Gradually, and with visible reluctance, his indignation wore away, and his episodes of outrage became briefer. One morning, Alma awoke to find Roger sleeping on the floor right next to her bed, which meant that he had entered her house the previous night without barking at all. That seemed significant. At the sound of Alma stirring, Roger growled and ran away, but he was back the next night, and was silent from then on. Inevitably, she did indeed try to feed him, and he did indeed try to bite her. Other than that, they fared well enough together. It was not that Roger became friendly, exactly, but he no longer appeared desirous of removing her throat from her body, and that was an improvement.
    Roger was a dreadful-looking dog. He was not only orange and mottled,with an irregularly shaped jaw and a bad limp, but it appeared that something had worked rather relentlessly to chew off a large section of his tail. Also, he was tuapu’u —hunchbacked. Still, Alma came to appreciate the dog’s presence. Ambrose must have loved him for some reason, she thought, and that intrigued her. She would gaze at the dog for hours and wonder what he knew about her husband—what he had witnessed. His companionship became a comfort. While she could not claim that Roger was protective or loyal toward her , he did seem to feel some sort of connection to the house. This made her feel somewhat less afraid to fall asleep alone at night, knowing that he was coming.
    This was good, for Alma had abandoned hope for any other measure of security or privacy. There was no gain to be had in even attempting to define boundaries around her home or her few remaining belongings. Adults, children, fauna, weather—at any hour of the day or night, for any reason at all, everybody and everything in Matavai Bay felt quite free to enter Alma’s fare . They did not always come empty-handed, to be fair. Pieces of her belongings reappeared over time, in bits and fragments. She never knew who brought these items back to her. She never saw it happen. It was as if the island itself were slowly coughing up portions of her swallowed luggage.
    In the first week, she recovered some paper, a petticoat, a vial of medicine, a bolt of cloth, a ball of twine, and a hairbrush. She thought, If I wait long enough, it will all be returned. But that was not true, for items were just as likely to vanish as to appear. She did get back her one other travel dress—its hemful of coins amazingly intact—which was a true blessing, though she