The others join him and drag the canoe into water. It is an older one, not as old as the ones over at the white houses, but old cedar and he is thinking how hard it was for his ancestors to bring in the large fish of any kind with these canoes, let alone a whale. They walk into the water with it and when they sit in it, he pushes it out. Then they begin, awkwardly, to paddle. He paddles the hardest as he looks at the beauty of the water, looking into it, thinking he would see the face so like his, Marco’s, looking back at him, looking up. We are not the fallen, he thinks. We are suspended and we can take this turn and rise.

They are traveling to the old village and the songs come to his voice. He sings. The water is like mother-of-pearl. The men smelling like men, the sea smelling like sea. He sings.

“That’s good,” says Dimitri.” That song, I sort of remember it.”

As for Thomas, he is whole. His mind, his heart, his being, all of him is in the paddles, the canoe, the water, and his song, too. He wants to live in the right way with the people, so he hasn’t said anything about Dwight coming back for this journey. He saw him come, but they were going to be better people and so he had decided to say nothing. Dwight was looking for this path, too, and he was part of them. Maybe forgiveness exists for all their deeds and the actions of humans, but he can’t stop thinking that Dwight probably killed his son. He couldn’t prove it. There was so much happening, the canoe overturning, the confusion. Someone saw it, he is sure—someone besides Milton. But it is so hard with the conquered, having no one but each other. How much they want to thrive and watch the life grow back, and also how much they want what the conquerors have, long journeys to beaches and hotels, good cars, better boots, and then they want the other, longer journeys where they imagine the ocean and recall the constellations that guided their ancestors. Thomas has now become something else, not one of the conquered any longer but whatever was deep in him all along and precious as if it, too, crossed the water, the old world new in him, yet old.

They are trying to be The People, he thinks as they lose sight of the shore and head north. But Thomas is there with the games god can play on men. He feels the force of it hit before he even hears the shot. He sees Dwight with the pistol. He hasn’t even finished the song when he falls backward as if through a door without a room, an anchor tossed down. He is still taken by the beauty of the world as he ages suddenly. His hair already is whitening with the salt. The spirit bones are all moving inside him. Dwight thinks, I killed him instantly. Thomas is thinking, Ha, there is no death.