Nevertheless, like Jonah in the book written by many men who heard the voices of their own gods, he washed up out of the belly of the Great Mysterious that held him, washed up to the old white houses, the houses that sat back from the shore made of lava and rock worn by centuries into sand, the place where the whale gave birth to the human and it was writ into stone, like a commandment, back up behind the houses of the old people.

There was surge and foam of ocean, the waves that rise over a mere human in all their greatness, and he washed up the way most alive men would gasp for a breath or double over in pain. But did he come ashore without breath and did they find the old person who revived him, the one, it was said, who brought back the dead? It may have been the same one who lobbied for the Rain Priest to come to them during the drought. If so, it would have been kept a secret. Also, others would have feared a man or woman with such great power and connections.

Perhaps Thomas had been enfolded by the large old octopus that appeared at his birth, and he was taken down for a time to its own magical world of shining things beneath the sea, its walled world with the hoard of eyeglasses, necklaces of rhinestone, the emeralds dropped by a Russian whaler’s wife.

When Thomas woke was he truly laughing at the stupidities and frailties of mere humans, as it was later told by the people to others?

When he arrives, he is carried by all that mystery to the old land where they hold to what is valuable, perhaps by the whale who heard his song and recalled it and knew his intentions.

Intentions are everything to the whale, older than the humans by millions of years. The whale, with its barnacles and wise old eye sees straight into the human soul. Through skin. Through bone. But perhaps, like some later would say, they saw an octopus lift him. Maybe the octopus took him to those who could help.

Now he is nearly naked, his clothes washed away, and he is newly born and so beautiful, this drowned handsome man who was loved and cherished by the people. They see him in the first blush of morning, newly arrived. He is a sleek branch of a man, muscular because they have been teaching him to paddle and swim and he has been working hard ever since he took down the fence and again faced the sea. They bend over him on the sand, the stronger ones kneel while the others marvel. Feather says, “Oh, no. It’s Thomas,” and he with two others get down on their knees over the body and lay their hands on him. Thomas is pushed and pressed and turned by their hands until the seawater runs from his throat.

When Thomas wakes he thinks he is dead. Then he laughs. A woman with her hair held by bone sticks helps him get up and stand and walk like old Witka, with almost no clothes, just rags now, with grime and weed, salt and blood falling from him and he walks into the white house place. He is as gray-haired as the rest. He is bent, hair hanging down. And old as she is, that one woman notices the man is pale as a fish and just as cold. She thinks, I am walking with a dead man. No one is more astute than she is. It was said at her birth that her soul was an ancient tree and so she leaves him to the one who revives the dead. Something secret is being done by the man who says he bought the gift of revival from an old man in a marketplace in Turkey, haggling about it over coffee that was the best in the world.