Together they sit and look back at the green hills. They both remember how one generation took down a forest. They don’t even need to say it. Thomas, who left his uniform behind in DC, says, “I have to think. How am I going to be remembered in the end?”

“What are you going to be remembered as?”

“What am I going to do? I’m changing history now. I am going to be remembered as the man who could kill but doesn’t. As the man who one day said I’m going to be like the old people, I’m going to be like the ancestors. If I ever have to kill a whale I will prepare for a year. I will have good thoughts. I will love the whale.

“I was wrong about so many things,” Thomas says.

She feels for him. “I know. Shh. Oh, look out at the water, Tom.” It is beautiful shades of color, worked by the sun and water.

“I thought Marco wasn’t my son. For a long time I thought that. I can’t forgive myself for that. I couldn’t even come home. I went to San Francisco. I found a place. Remember Van Gogh’s room, the one we used to look at in the picture I had? It was like that. That’s why I moved there. And it was cheap.”

He has traveled away from the subject. “Anyway, I came home and I went to look up the date of Marco’s birth.”

“Yeah. I know. The girl at records told me. Here.” She pours him coffee, thinking maybe he’d been drinking with “the boys,” as she’s always called them. She doesn’t smell alcohol, but then suddenly she’s angry. She remembers the evening he came to the meeting, her excitement, seeing him finally, after all the lost and gone years, the years she had waited for him, then grieved him, that night telling him where Marco was, pointing out their son to him so he could at least love the young man, if he did not love her all those years.

“You’re right. You’ve been wrong and you are a bastard.” But she’s not yelling, just stating what sounds true. “One hell of a bastard.”

“It was Dwight. That’s what he told me. We met at a landing strip in Da Nang and he said you were with my father.”

“Yes. It’s always him, isn’t it? It was Dwight who killed my son. Ours. I feel it. I know it every time I have to look at him.” She becomes fierce. “Everything was always Dwight. He was jealous of you. Always. First he wanted what you had. He wanted to be you. Later he wanted what Marco had because you know what your son had? Marco had the old ways. The thing is, Dwight could have had them if he’d tried, if he could have given up some few, meaningless things. You could have them even now. The old people want us to learn and know.