The Signature of All Things

respected missions on various outer islands. She pushed herself to recall the details of that single, long-ago conversation, but her recollection was frustratingly indistinct. Raiatea may indeed have been one of the islands he had mentioned, Alma felt, but she was certain he had never brought up the name “Tomorrow Morning.” Alma would have taken note of that name, had she ever heard it. Those words would have immediately alerted her attention, brimming as they did with personal associations. No, she had never heard the name spoken before. The Reverend Welles had called him by something else.
    Sister Etini rushed past again, arms empty this time, and once more Alma darted forth and detained her. She knew she was being a pest, but could not stop herself.
    “Sister Etini,” she asked. “What is Tomorrow Morning’s name?”
    Sister Etini looked puzzled. “His name is Tomorrow Morning,” she said simply.
    “What does Brother Welles call him, though?”
    “Ah!” Sister Etini’s eyes lit up. “Brother Welles calls him by his Tahitian name, which is Tamatoa Mare. But Tomorrow Morning is a nickname he invented for himself, when he was just a little boy! He prefers to be called that. He was always so facile with language, Sister Whittaker—quite the best student Mrs. Welles and I ever had, and you will find that he speaks far better English than do I—and he could hear, even from earliest childhood, that his Tahitian name sounded like those English words. He was always so clever. Now the name suits him, we all agree, for he brings such hope, you understand, to everyone he meets. Like a new day.”
    “Like a new day,” Alma repeated.
    “Exactly, yes.”
    “Sister Etini,” Alma said. “I am sorry, but I have one last question. When was the last time Tamatoa Mare was here at Matavai Bay?”
    Sister Etini answered without hesitation. “November of 1850.”
    Sister Etini rushed off. Alma sat down in the shade again and watchedthe mirthful mayhem unfold. She watched it with no joy. She felt an indentation in her heart, as though somebody were pressing a thumbprint through her chest, deep and firm.
    Ambrose Pike had died here in November of 1850.
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    I t took Alma some time to come near Tomorrow Morning. That night was a mighty celebration—a feast worthy of a monarch, which was certainly how the man was regarded. Hundreds of Tahitians crowded the beach, eating roasted pigs, fish, and breadfruit, and enjoying arrowroot pudding, yams, and countless coconuts. Bonfires were lit, and the people danced—not the most obscene dances, of course, for which Tahiti was once so infamous, but the least offensive traditional dance, the one they called the hura. Even this would not have been permitted in any other mission settlement on the island, but Alma knew that the Reverend Welles sometimes allowed it. (“I simply cannot see the harm in it,” he had once told Alma, who had begun to think of this oft-repeated phrase as a perfect motto for the Reverend Welles.)
    Alma had never seen the dance performed before, and she was as captivated as anyone else. The young female dancers wore their hair ornamented with triple strands of jasmine and gardenia blossoms, and flowers draped over their necks. The music was slow and undulating. Some of the girls had faces marked by the pox, but in the firelight all were equally beautiful. One could get a sense of the women’s limbs and hips in motion, even underneath their long-sleeved, shapeless, missionary-prescribed dresses. It was very much the most provocative dance Alma had ever seen (their hands alone were provocative, she marveled), and she could not begin to imagine what this dance must have looked like to her father back in 1777, when the women performing it wore grass skirts and nothing else. Quite a show it must have been, for a young boy from Richmond attempting to uphold his virtue.
    From time to time athletic men jumped into the dance ring to perform comic, buffoonish interruptions to the hura. The point of this, Alma thought at first, was to break the sensual mood with mirth,but they, too, soon began testing the limitations of lewdness in their movements. There was a recurrent joke of the men grasping toward the female dancers, while the girls gracefully darted away without missing a step. Even the youngestchildren appeared to understand the underlying allusion to desire and rebuke playing itself out in the performance, and they howled with a degree of laughter that