The Shell Collector

  But he is learning. It is as if he is learning all over again how to put the world into words. A tree is an open hand shaken twice by your right ear; whale is three fingers dipped through a sea made by the opposite forearm. The sky is two hands touched above the head, then swept apart, as though a rift has formed in the clouds and you are swimming through them, into heaven.

  Thunder over the ocean, ravens screaming in the high branches. A little longer, Joseph thinks. The tomatoes will be ready. It begins to rain—cold, earnest drops fly through the boughs. He has not seen Belle in two weeks when he finds her in the garden, wearing a blue raincoat, stooped among the rows of plants, yanking weeds from the ground and hurling them into the brambles. The drops pop off her shoulders. He watches for a moment. Lightning strobes the sky. Rain runs off the end of her nose.

  He steps in among the plants, the tomatoes weighing dreamily on their stems, the melons a pale green against the gray mud on their flanks. He pulls a thin weed and shakes the mud from its roots. “Last year,” he says, “whales died here. On the beach. Six of them. Whales have their own language, clicks and creaks and clinking like bottles being smashed together. On the beach they talked to each other as they died. Like old ladies.”

  She shakes her head. Her eyes are red. I’m sorry, he signs. Please. He says, “I was stupid. Your idea is not any more strange than probably every idea I have ever had.”

  After a moment he adds, “I buried the hearts from the whales in the forest.” He makes the sign for heart over his chest.

  She looks at him, canting her head. Her face softens. What? she signs.

  “I buried them here.” He wants to say more, wants to tell her the whales’ story. But does he even know it? Does he even know why they came ashore, what they do when they don’t come ashore? What happens to the bodies of whales which do not strand—do they wash up, rolling in the surf one day, rotten and bloated? Do they sink? Are their bodies mulled over at the bottom of the oceans where some strange, deepwater garden can grow up through their bones?

  She studies him, her hands spread in the dirt. It’s her attention, he thinks. The way she fixes me with her eyes. The way I feel like she’s listening all the time, enwombed in that impenetrable silence. Her pale fingers browse among the stems, a raindrop slips down the curve of a green tomato, he has a sudden need to tell her everything. All his petty crimes, the way his mother left for the market in the morning while he slept—a hundred confessions surge through him. He has been waiting too long; the words have been building behind a dyke and now the dyke is breached and the river is slipping its banks. He wants to tell her what he has learned about the miracles of light, the way a day’s light fluxes in tides: pale and gleaming at dawn, the glare of noon, the gold of evening, the promise of twilight— every second of every day has its own magic. He wants to tell her that when things vanish they become something else, in death we rise again in the blades of grass, the splitting bodies of seeds. But his past is flooding out: the dictionary, the ledger, his mother, the horrors he has seen.

  “I had a mother,” he says. “She disappeared.” He cannot tell if Belle is reading his lips; she is looking away, lifting a tomato and scraping some mud from its underside, letting it back down. Joseph squats in front of her. The storm stirs the trees.

  “She had a garden. Like this but nicer. More . . . orderly.”

  He realizes he does not know how to talk about his mother; he has no words for it. “For years I stole money,” he says. He is not sure she understands. Rain pours over his glasses. “And I killed a man.” She looks over the top of his head and makes no sign.

  “I did not even know who he was or if he was the man they said he was. But I killed him.”

  Now Belle looks at him with her forehead creased as if in fear and Joseph cannot bear the look but he cannot stop either. There are so many things to give words to: how beached whales smother themselves with the black cannons of their own bodies, the songs of the forest, starlight limning the crests of waves, the way his mother bent in furrows to scatter seeds. He wants to use hand signs that will remake them; he wants her to see his poor, sordid histories reassembled out of the darkness. Every corpse he passed and left unburied; the body of the man slumped on the tennis court; the stolen junk locked even now in the cellar of his mother’s house.

  Instead he speaks of the whales. “One of the whales,” he says, “lived longer than the others. People were tearing skin and fat from the dead one beside it. It watched them do it with its big brown eye and in the end it beat the beach with its flippers, slapping the sand. I was as far away as the house is from us right now and I could feel the ground shaking.”

  Belle is looking at him, a dirty tomato in her palm. Joseph is on his knees. Tears are flooding his eyes.

  A ripening: one last warm day, a half dozen tanagers poised on a branch like golden flowers, a leaning of tomatoes to the sun. The silk of the melon flowers seem infused with light; any moment they could burst into flame. Joseph watches Belle fight on the lawn with her mother—they are returning from the beach. Belle slashes the air with her hands. Her mother flings down her beach chair, signs something back. Does the girl, Joseph wonders, carry her secrets deep within her? Or do they sit on the edges of her fingertips, ready to fly into language, ready to sign to her mother? The African you fired lives in the woods. He embezzled money and killed a man. Do secrets boil inside her like steam in a kettle? Or do they settle like seeds, waiting to open until the time is right? No, Joseph thinks, Belle understands. She has kept her secrets far better than I’ve kept mine.

  He smells the sweet fruit of a tomato, pink now with a swatch of yellow on one side, and the aroma is almost too much to bear.

  But in the morning he is discovered. It is just dawn and he is tearing mussels from the rocks and placing them in his rusted drum when a figure appears atop the dunes. Bars of light break through the trees and then—as if the sun conspired to give him away—a single ray fixes him against the water. Behind the figure appear several others; they tumble down the dunes, wading in the loose sand, laughing toward him.

  They are carrying drinks and their voices sound drunken and he considers dumping his drum and turning and swimming out to sea to be swept away in some current and dashed forever against the rocks of a faraway place. When they get close to him they stop. Twyman’s wife is with them and she walks right to him—her face flushed and twitching—and throws her drink against his chest and screams.

  He does not think to get rid of the book of hand signs and when they see it tucked inside the waistband of his trousers things become more serious. Mrs. Twyman turns the book over in her hands and shakes her head and seems unable to speak. “Where did he get that?” the others say. Two men move to flank him, their faces quivering, their fists clenched.

  They take him over the dunes, up the trail and across the lawn, past the garage where he lived, the shed he raided for his hoe and seeds. There is no sign of Belle. Mr. Twyman charges out of the house shirtless, hitching up his sweatpants. The words tangle inside him. “The nerve,” he spits. “The nerve.”

  There is the sound of sirens, far off. From the lawn Joseph tries to make out the spot atop the hill where the garden is, a small break in a bulwark of spruce, but there is only a smear of green, and soon they are pushing him forward into the house and there is nothing at all to see, only the massive dining table strewn with dishes and half-empty drinks and the faces all around him, spitting questions.

  They drive him, handcuffed, to Bandon and place him in an office with antique sirens and plastic softball trophies along the shelves. Two policemen sit on the edge of a desk and take turns repeating questions. They ask what he did with the girl, why, where they went. Twyman rages somewhere in the building: Joseph cannot hear the words but only the cracking of Twyman’s voice as it reaches its limits. The policemen on the desk are blank-faced, leaning in.

  “What did you eat? Did you eat anything? You don’t look like you’ve eaten at all.” “How much
time did you spend with the girl? Where did you take her?” “Why don’t you speak to us? We can make it easier for you.” They ask for the fiftieth time how he got the book of sign language. I’m a gardener, he wants to tell them. Leave me be. But he says nothing.

  They lock him in a cell where the texture has been painted off of everything—the cinder block walls, the floor, the frame of the cot, the bars in the window, all rounded over with coats of paint. Only the sink and toilet are unpainted, the curling design of a thousand scrubbings worked into the steel. The window looks onto a brick wall fifteen or so feet away. A naked bulb hangs from the ceiling, too high to reach. Even at night it burns, a tiny, unnatural sun.

  He sits on the floor and imagines weeds overwhelming the garden, their blades hauling down the tomato plants, their interloping roots curling through whatever is left of the whales’ hearts. He imagines the tomatoes blooming into full ripeness, drooping from the vines, black spots opening like burns on their sides, finally falling, eaten hollow by flies. The melons turning over and crumpling. Platoons of ants tunneling through rinds, bearing off shining chunks of fruit. In a year the garden will be nothing but salmonberry and nettle, no different than anywhere else, nothing to tell its story.

  He wonders where Belle is. He hopes she is far away and tries to picture her behind the wheel of a Volkswagen, a forearm on the sill, some southern highway unrolling before her, the wide fields of the sea coming into view as she rounds a bend.

  He does not eat the peanut butter sandwiches they slide under the bars. After two days the marshal stands at the bars and asks if he wants something else. Joseph shakes his head.

  “A body has to eat,” the marshal declares. He slides a pack of crackers through. “Eat these. You’ll feel better.”

  Joseph does not. It is not protest or sickness, as the policemen seem to think. It is merely the idea of eating that makes him queasy, the idea of mashing food in his teeth and forcing lumps of it down his throat. He sets the crackers beside the sandwiches, on the rim of the sink.

  The marshal watches him a full minute before turning to go. “You know,” he says, “I’ll put you in the hospital and you can die there.”

  A lawyer tries to coerce a story out of him. “What did you do in Liberia? These people think you’re dangerous—they’re saying you’re retarded. Are you? Why won’t you speak?” There is no fight in Joseph, no anger, no outrage at injustice. He is not guilty of their crimes but he is guilty of so many others. There has never been a man guilty of so much, he thinks, a man more deserving of penalty. “Guilty!” he wants to scream. “I have been guilty all my life.” But he has no energy. He shifts and feels his bones settling against the floor. The lawyer, exasperated, departs.

  There are no more gates within him, no more divisions. It is as if everything he has done in his life has pooled together inside him and slops dully against his edges. His mother, the man he has killed, the languishing garden—he will never be able to live it down, never live through it, never live enough to compensate for all the things he has stolen.

  Two more days without food and he is taken to a hospital—they carry him like his skin is a bag inside which his bones knock together. He can remember only the dull pain of knuckles on his sternum. He wakes in a room, propped on a bed, with tubes plugged into his arms.

  In half-dreams he sees terrible visions: the limbless bodies of men materialized on the bureau or the corner chair; the floor lined with corpses in the unnatural poses of death, flies on their eyes, dried blood in their ears. Sometimes when he wakes he sees the man he has killed kneeling on the foot of the bed, his blue beret in his lap, his arms still tied behind his back. The wound in his forehead is fresh, a drill hole rimmed in black, his eyes open. “I have never even been in an airplane,” he says. Any minute now a nurse will come into the room and see the dead man kneeling on the foot of the bed and that will be it. Finally, Joseph thinks, I must pay for it.

  There are other visitors: Mrs. Twyman in the corner chair, her thin arms crossed over her chest. Her eyes are on his; purple stains like bruises throb beneath her eye sockets. “What?” she screams. “What?” And Belle comes, or what might have been Belle—Joseph wakes and remembers her sliding open the window, pointing at gulls on the Dumpsters. But he does not know if he dreamed it, if she is on her way to Argentina, if she even thinks of him. His window is closed, the curtains drawn. When the nurse opens it he can see there are no Dumpsters, just lawn, a parking lot.

  Another week or so and a lawyer comes, a clean-shaven pink man with acne around his collar. He reads to Joseph from a newspaper article that says Liberia has held democratic elections; Charles Taylor is the new president, the war is over, refugees are flooding back. “You are to be deported, Mr. Saleeby,” he says. “It’s very very good for you. The tools you stole and the trespassing— the court will drop these things. Negligence and the accusations of abuse are dropped too. You’re absolved, Mr. Saleeby. Free.”

  Joseph leans back in his bed and realizes that he does not care.

  A nurse announces a visitor. She has to help him from the bed and when he stands black spots fill his vision. She folds him into a wheelchair and carts him down the hall and out a side door into a small fenced courtyard.

  It is so bright Joseph feels as if his head might crack open. She wheels him to a picnic table in the center of the lawn, fringed by a fence, with cars parked in a lot behind it, and returns the way she came. Joseph strains his eyes toward the sky; it is dazzling, a seething bowl of clouds. A bank of trees beyond the lot tosses in the wind—half the leaves are down and the branches swing together. It is autumn, he realizes. He imagines the blackened, withered roots of his garden, the shriveled tomatoes and wrinkled leaves, a frost paralyzing everything. He wonders if this is where they’ll leave him, finally, to die. The nurse will return in a few days, empty him from the chair and bury what’s left, the leather of his skin pulling back, the black seed of his heart giving way, the bones settling into the earth.

  A door opens into the courtyard and from the doorway steps Belle. She has her knapsack over her shoulders and she walks toward Joseph with a shy smile and seats herself at the picnic table. Beneath the collar of her windbreaker he can see the strap of her shirt, a pale collarbone, a trio of freckles above it. The wind lifts strands of her hair and sets them back down.

  He holds his head in his hands and studies her and she studies him. She makes the sign for how are you and Joseph tries to make it back. They smile and sit. Sun winks off the cars in the lot. “Is this real?” Joseph asks. Belle cocks her head. “Are you real? Am I awake?” She squints and nods as if to say, of course. She points over her shoulder, at the parking lot. I drove here, she signs. Joseph says nothing but smiles and props his head in his hands because his neck will not hold it up.

  Then she seems to remember why she has come and takes the knapsack from her shoulder and produces two melons, which she sets on the table between them. Joseph looks at her with his eyes wide. “Are those . . . ?” he asks. She nods. He takes one of the melons in his hands. It is heavy and cool; he raps his knuckles against it.

  Belle takes a penknife from the pocket of her windbreaker and stabs the other melon, cutting in an arc across its diameter, and when, with a tiny sound of yielding, the melon splits into two hemispheres, a sweet smell washes up. In the wet, stringy cup within are dozens of seeds.

  Joseph scoops them out and spreads them over the wood of the table, each white and marbled with pulp and perfect. They shine in the sun. The girl saws a wedge from one of the halves. The flesh is wet and shining and Joseph cannot believe the color—it is as if the melon carried light within it. They each lift a chunk of it to their lips and eat. It seems to him that he can taste the forest, the trees, the storms of the winter and the size of the whales, the stars and the wind. A tiny gob of melon slides down Belle’s chin. Her eyes are closed. When they open she sees him and her mouth splits into a smile.

  They eat and eat and Joseph feels the wet pulp o
f the melon slipping down his throat. His hands and lips are sticky. Joy mounts in his chest; any moment his whole body could dissolve into light.

  They eat the second melon too, again taking the seeds from the core and spreading them over the table to dry. When they are done they divide the seeds and the girl wraps each half in a piece of notebook paper and they put the damp packets of seeds in their pockets.

  Joseph sits and feels the sun come down on his skin. His head feels weightless, as though it would float away if not for his neck. He thinks: If I had to do it over again, I’d bury the whole whales. I’d sow the ground with bucketfuls of seeds—not just tomatoes and melons, but pumpkins and beans and potatoes and broccoli and maize. I’d fill the beds of a hundred dumptrucks with seeds. Huge gardens would come up. I’d make a garden so huge and colorful everyone would see it; I’d let the weeds grow and the ivy, everything would grow, everything would get its chance.

  Belle is crying. He takes her hands and holds her thin, articulate fingers against his own. He wonders if the dust has piled up against the walls of the house in the hills outside Monrovia. He wonders if hummingbirds still flit between the cups of the flowers, if by some miracle his mother could be there, kneeling in the soil, if they could work together cleaning away the dust, sweeping, brooming it up, carrying it out the door and pitching it into the yard, watching it unfurl in great rust-colored clouds, to be taken up by the wind and scattered somewhere else.

  “Thank you,” he says, but cannot be sure if he says it aloud. The clouds split and the sky brims over with light—it pours onto them, glazing the surface of the picnic table, the backs of their hands, the wet, carved bowls of the melon rinds. Everything feels very tenuous, just then, and terribly beautiful, as if he is straddling two worlds, the one he came from and the one he is going to. He wonders if this is what it was like for his mother, in the moments before she died, if she saw the same kind of light, if she felt like anything was possible.