And so it began, and then it lasted too long, which was not a good sign. Even when it was over, they still sat there. Two young men behind them built a fire and downed cans of beer. Blue Ice. The women barely noticed them, except one wanted to talk. He told Ruth, “I was in Vietnam. Everywhere the women and children cried. That’s all they did, all the time. They cried.” He had said the same words to her so many times, every time she walked the beach.

It was early evening when the men came in with only one canoe, and with help from the Coast Guard, the other canoe in tow. Both vessels had many ropes uncoiled and were trying together to bring the whale up toward the dragging beach. It was not full-grown. By then some of the men in the canoe were not sober and they were laughing. Delphine turned away. “This is even worse than I thought it would be.” Others came down to watch, a few cheering, and the three women viewed this scene with sorrow and even horror, the excited men in T-shirts and wet jeans breathing hard as they tried to drag the sand-covered, bloody, weed-covered whale up the ancient dragging beach, once smoothed solid with fat and blood. Whales had been brought into this place for over a thousand years. More, perhaps. But never like this. Now they had the help of white men. They had the help even of reporters who had arrived to reveal this action to the world. No matter their views on the event, the watchers saw the situation, and that the whale could not be brought in without them. There was nothing else to do. There had not been enough planning, and so together they all hefted ropes. Dwight wore his Rod and Gun Club jacket for the photographers. The whale was sideways, then righted, and then, as an afterthought, Thomas and someone else ran for a truck with a winch for towing.

Ruth felt that she could hate Thomas forever for not trying to stop them, for being part of it, until she saw him when he returned with the brown truck. He looked pale and serious. He alone looked as if he had done this with purpose, as if he were sorry now to be involved, and had truly believed that they were trying to do this in the right way. And so she had compassion for him, the father of her son, the man whose missing years were a secret to her. She saw in his face, in the way he held his body, like a bow without a string, that something terrible had happened to him in those years, that this was terrible, too, with unforeseen consequences, more than he even knew until he became a part of it. And she realized he hadn’t known about the money the others had accepted until it was too late. She, who had fought them, did not tell him, and when she announced it at the meeting, he simply didn’t, or couldn’t, understand. In all the years he’d been gone, he had no idea what the other men had become. And she was their enemy.