The Signature of All Things

heretic? Was he a simpleton? Was his innocence practiced or natural? One could never tell from his face, which was perpetually bathed in the clear light of ingenuousness. He had a face so open it would shame the suspicious, the greedy, the cruel. It was a face that would shame a liar. It was a face that sometimes shamed Alma, for she had never been candid with him about her own history or motives. Sometimes she wanted to reach down and take his small hand in her giant one, and—forgoing their respectable titles of Brother Welles and Sister Whittaker—to say to him simply, “I have not been forthright with you, Francis. Let me tell you my entire story. Let me tell you about my husband and our unnatural marriage. Please help me to understand who Ambrose was. Please tell me what you knew about him, and please tell me what you know about The Boy.”
    But she did not. He was a minister of the Lord and an honorable, married Christian. How could she speak to him of such things?
    The Reverend Welles told Alma his entire story, though, and held little back. He told her that, only a few years after King Pōmare’s conversion, he and Mrs. Welles, quite unexpectedly, had another baby girl. This time, the infant lived. Mrs. Welles saw it as a sign of the Lord’s approval—that the Welleses had helped to Christianize Tahiti. As such, they named the child Christina. During this time, the family was living in the nicest cottage in the settlement, right next to the church, in the very cottage where Sister Manu now lived, and happy they were indeed. Mrs. Welles and her daughter grew snapdragons and larkspurs, and they made a right little English garden of the place. The girl learned to swim before she could walk, like any other island child.
    “Christina was my joy and my reward,” said the Reverend Welles. “ButTahiti is no place, my wife believed, for an English girl to be raised. There are so many polluting influences, you see. I disagree, but that is what Mrs. Welles thought. When Christina became a young woman, Mrs. Welles took her back to England. I have not seen them since. I will not see them again.”
    This fate seemed not only lonely to Alma, but terribly unfair. No good Englishman, she thought, should be left here, all by himself in the middle of the South Seas, to face his old age in solitude. She thought of her father in his last years: What would he have done without Alma?
    As though reading her face, the Reverend Welles said, “I long for my good wife and for Christina, but I have not been completely without the company of family. I consider Sister Manu and Sister Etini to be my sisters in more than name. At our mission school, too, we have been fortunate enough over the years to have raised up several brilliant and good-hearted students, whom I regard as my own children, and some of them have now become missionaries themselves, you see. They now minister to the outer islands, these native students of ours. There is Tamatoa Mare, who brings the gospel to the great island of Raiatea. There is Patii, who extends the Redeemer’s kingdom to the island of Huanhine. There is Paumoana, tireless in the Lord’s name in Bora-Bora. All of them are my sons, and all are much admired. There is such a thing in Tahiti called taio , you see, which is a kind of adoption, a means of making strangers into your kin. When you enter into taio with a native, you trade genealogy, you see, and you become a portion of each other’s lineage. Lineage is most important here. There are Tahitians who can recite their lineage back thirty generations—not unlike the begats of the Bible, you see. To be entered into that lineage is a noble honor. So I have my Tahitian sons with me, so to speak, who live amid these islands, and they are a comfort to this old man.”
    “But they are not with you,” Alma could not help but say. She knew exactly how far away Bora-Bora was. “They are not here to help you, nor care for you should you need them.”
    “You speak the truth, but it is a comfort merely to know they exist. You think my life quite sad, I fear. Do not be mistaken. I live where I am meant to live. I could never leave my mission, you see. My work here is not an errand, Sister Whittaker. My work here is not a line of employment, you see, from which a man may retire into a comfortable dotage. My work is to keep this little church alive for all my days, as a raft against the winds and sorrows of the world. Whosoever wishes to board my