The Last Whale
She dreamed it was the whale who drove her into shore and left her body limp on wet sand...
“There are words for events and experiences that evolve when people feel free,” she said, smiling, brushing her palm through the blue sky.
The abstraction disturbed the child who had problems yet to come to light. Fears from yesterday’s dreams. He had trouble sleeping, because he could not wake up, sometimes for days, when his grandmother would feed him soaked seeds from the fog tree, which he had seen her gather from the mountain path. She was strong, he believed. Her elder body slender, her neck long, like her thick white hair that fell to one side when she laughed, so shiny it reflected sunlight and fire at night. And stars that he could name even before he was born. She failed to explain many things, such as, that the seeds he lazily chewed were once alive, but not now. Or why the wolves deposited them on the forest floor swallowed and eliminated them before and after a heavy rain, waiting sometimes weeks in between. The cusps, finally thin, having been trapped in digestive fluids, she peeled, freeing the shiny black iron rich beads called fog-stones. Flacked with stellar constellations that his grandmother set in ink on her head, after she shaved it, which she did every other spring. They left patterns that resembled the constellations visible where they lived. The Southern Cross was framed in dark spots that at night shown by the fire, meant to demonstrate how far the wolves traveled to hunt before they returned.
There had been only one whale that mattered, his grandmother said. The one that was too large for the cove. So she paddled her dugout canoe for a visit when it showed its back, which it did every other day between the time when the warm days came and went. The whale preferred the cold. The whale was not her enemy, but not her friend, she reminded him many times over the years. No animal is. But the whale is unique. The whale owns the coast of every parcel of land in the world. The richest creature on earth that no man or woman or child could ride, though he once allowed her to swim beside him, after she learned to go deep on one breath. And then there had been the time she got lost, having swum too far down. When she came to the surface, she was too weak to float. One lung had nearly burst, and her skin was blue. She had hurt her throat. She floated for hours and finally felt so cold she was sure she passed out. She dreamed it was the whale who drove her into shore and left her body limp on wet sand. Afterward, the whale came and went, staying so far out, only a ship passing could follow its path, the spouting on the surface far and few between. Soon after, even the reports of sightings stopped for many years. The ones who traveled were young and hunted down.
She described in detail to her grandson the scars that etched the big whale’s years into its flesh. Some like small mirrors reflected the heavens, and even the black holes that devoured light, condensing the wound, its crater’s gully, pale tissue and twisted fibers, glowing in the dark waters, not pink as the blooms of man-o-war, but pearl-blue like a deserted oyster shell. That the wounds healed at all soured the minds of hunters who forever identified with their failure to bring him down and finish him off, like the ones whose blubber the pack of whales, swarming beyond the reef, could identify from far off, reviving their kin in memoriam, when the shoreline was squashed by the fumes from the smoking flesh, the blood captured in tins, the whole of the creature divided into parts, fried and eaten, melted for oil that kept their fires and warmed their hands when the ice grew thick and deeper than they could dig.
She walked with him, his little feet still outturned, when he was no larger than an otter fishing its way through ports along the shores, the adult otters lying belly up to face the sky and sun, surviving the race that would skin their young to cover their own heads during cold winds. His legs grew strong, like hers. He could run and swim.
The salmon climbing the steep rocks of their uphill swim, jumping the stone fences, the barriers that could never halt their return to their foremost banks inside of which the water frothed and in whose shadows they themselves had been spawned and fought for their lives to be able to make their journey down and up and up and down, riding out the full moons and starlit skies whose similar maps grew dark spots into their silver skins, as if in a willful display of how the world turned.
She taught him what she could, restraining herself when he grew bored or tired or was busying himself with his own world, his curiosity for seedless foods, or so she let him think there were such things, until he realized he was deep in sleep, dreaming again. How had he been born, he asked, if he had not once been a seed? There is no such thing, his grandmother explained. The air we breathe and the light of the firefly are born of the seeds of the sun that rises and falls whether we see it or not. It is from the sun laying its course, the turning of the moon from side to side, that revive us who survive the swim, as had he, she explained, despite the return to the earthen dirt of the life and womb in which he grew. The soil now covered in tall grass that would come and grow like all things from a seed. It happened the last year that she saw the last whale. It was why he slept and dreamed, she said, more than any other child she or her own grandmother and her grandmother before her had known. Why his name was Shaw. Short for scrimshaw, of course, she said, laughing and laughing, to his delight. It is all a dream, she said. There is no better or safer or more real sight than what is seen in a dream, for the heart learns to beat harder therein. Nothing to fear in the whale within, the beauty there. The glory in the breach.
Constance Christopher’s work has been in Fence, Bomb, Northwest Review, & Ginosko. A novel Dead Man’s Flower was published in the Bogie’s Mystery series. She has published reviews for Publisher’s Weekly and worked in film & television. She is painting a large oil based on Robert Graves’ White Goddess.
Apologies. I hit my own "like" button twice. Maybe not a sin. Constance
Wow! Thanks for unlocking the key to this vision, this dream. I need to re-read it. Amazing movement.